


The Last Irken

by dietofwurms



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Alien Biology, But will they realize the real treasure was inside them all along??, Deep Lore, Ethical Quandaries, Eventual Love Triangle (of sorts), F/M, Gen, I Shove Canon into My Mouth & Chew It & Spit It Up, Interplanetary Travel, Original Character(s), Other Main Characters Play an Important Role, PAK Editing, Personality-Altering Shenanigans, Post-Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, Thank You For Attending My TED Talk, There will be extensive talks on biology and sexual reproduction and it will not be sexy, This Will Never Be Slash, Zim & Dib Go On An Adventure, Zim and Dib Don't Get Along In This Fic, but spoilers, irken history, this is not slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2020-11-28 08:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 46,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20963357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dietofwurms/pseuds/dietofwurms
Summary: After the Florpus Incident, Zim finds himself unable to contact the Tallest or, more worryingly, any other Irkens. With his PAK malfunctioning and the network failing, he resorts to asking for help from the now-distant and disillusioned Dib.But this repair unearths a mystery that leads the pair on a strange journey through the secret history of the Irken Empire. There's intrigue; there's corrupted memories; there's a possible vast conspiracy to cover up monstrous truths.Zim's not happy about any of this.





	1. The Long Summer

**Author's Note:**

> Woah this came out of nowhere!  
Who knows what will come of this? It's mostly just for fun, after seeing the movie and remembering how much I like the characters. Story will get more serious as it moves ahead, but, ah, I think I like keeping a hint of the zany.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy this TOTALLY ORIGINAL AND UNIQUE start to a Zim story (which will, in a few chapters, derail):

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um... accidentally deleted this chapter somehow... omg...

Chapter 1: The Long Summer

On a muggy June morning of no particular importance, Zim felt a thought slither into his cortex like a stinging worm: Invaders _ hate _ summer.

Any bit of self-awareness would have corrected this non-sequitur, as the "summer" he was prepared to gripe about did not exist on Irk, either as a season or as a calendar of events. His errant thought also failed to consider that his "summer" was a local phenomena, too, defined by the weather of his current location in North America, and enforced by national and local government. 

No, a clearer way of thinking would be that Invaders hated the particular aspects of summer he now decried: heat and boredom.

Boredom, because Invaders lived for their missions, flourished in strict scheduled environments, and loathed paths without direction.

Heat, because their uniforms chafed when the temperature rose and the cloth rubbed up against their worm-like skin.

Zim had means to battle the heat, and in fact, the summer months most of the time did not exacerbate this issue too much, because without required school attendance, his need to remain upstairs dwindled, and the underground base remained crisp and cool even through the boiling swells of July and August. He came to spend nearly every hour of the day in some part of his laboratory, studying and preparing and planning.

Boredom, on the other hand, was an affliction he did not respond to well. If he did not have a list of tasks to complete, he would circle uselessly about, repeating the same futile gestures, tuning the same equipment, cleaning the same surfaces, and recording endless logs purporting to preserve documentation of his accomplishments. This only got worse as he stayed underground, because his sense of time would dissipate, and as he didn't sleep, he could go for days before he realized he was caught in a malproductive loop.

That was how he came to this moment, positioning himself in front of his main console at three in the morning, feet aching, throat itching from rehearsal.

"A-HEM!"

Zim checked the fit of his boots one more time. The crisp, wrinkle-free surface of his uniform. The lint plucked from his gloves. The sweat came through the edges of his tunic, and he prayed it wouldn't be visible on screen; he cursed the heat, though he stood in the center of his underground lair, blasted by heavily conditioned air. He gurgled a sip of soda to let the bubbling carbon burn away the rawness in his voice.

"All right! Computer. Start recording."

"_Hrmm… Here goes… Take fifty-two… _"

Zim cleared some phlegm, brightened his eyes with enforced enthusiasm, and saluted.

"My Tallest! Invader Zim here, reporting for duty. I continue to experience the network malfunction preventing me from communicating with you live, but know that I'm not allowing that to stymie my progress! I will resume shipping you my pre-recorded messages in the hopes that they find you well."

Zim fidgeted a second, then took a nervous breath. His message took a turn from his usual bravado tone, into something more cloying, more pathetic.

"Now, I can't help but notice I haven't received any responses to my latest reports. I know it's not my place to demand anything from you, but it has been two months, and I've waited with tremendous patience. Surely, there must be some time in your schedule to at least send me some confirmation. I'd hate to find that my messages aren't reaching you, as they include such incredible, AMAZING, incomparable results, proving my worth as an Invader." He clasped his hands together, sucked in a nervous breath in his pause, and concluded lamely: "Anyway, that's it, I guess. Looking forward to hearing from you…?" He slapped down on his keyboard to sign off, chomped on his tongue, and screeched. "'_ Looking forward to hearing from you'!? _AUGH! WHAT WAS THAT? THAT WAS TERRIBLE!"

"_It was an improvement over your first draft,_" the computer assured him, though even Zim knew this was a low bar. His first take involved profuse weeping and gnashing of teeth.

"You're sure? I thought it came off too needy. I-I think I should go again."

But the computer, desperate not to have to sit through another take, gently pushed back. "_Sir, you should spend more time fixing the base's technical problems._"

Zim growled at being redirected by his own base's AI, but his body ached for reprieve. He chuffed and pulled out his command chair. "Fine, _ fine,_ whatever! Send it." Zim waved a hand, and it was done; a satellite cannon fired off the disk. He collapsed into his seat. He slumped, swallowed back another slug of soda, and returned to work.

He ejected a connector cable from his PAK to plug into the console and, after entering his password, tried to connect. A flat, warning tone blared, and a message flashing _ Connection Not Established _ illuminated the dome. "Still nothing," he sighed in defeat. He disconnected the cable and proceeded to hammer some code into the console. His vision blurred with uncharacteristic exhaustion; he rubbed his eyes, unaware of how bags had come to form beneath them. "Computer, have you made any progress in diagnosing the network issue?"

"_Your protocol ID cannot connect to the Irken communication network. This could be due to a PAK malfunction, a network error, a local hardware problem, or the result of changed permissions." _

"Which means…"

A giant gleaming-red question mark appeared on the looming screen, looking down on him like a stern glower. "_It means I still have no idea what's wrong_."

"Urrgh! Useless!" Zim hobbled over to his workshop area, where he promptly slipped off his PAK and set it on its stand. He tapped on the tablet already prepped at the counter, which brought up the text of a manual for PAK troubleshooting. On top of his network problems, he had started to notice his PAK behaving strangely; at regular intervals, its chassis would become hot to the touch, to the point of burning his uniform and skin, and he noticed frequent delays and stalls in his automated commands. Fortunately, these issues hadn't disrupted any plans thus far, and didn't seem to impact his connection to the PAK's memory functions, but he began to suspect it had something to do with its inability to connect to the network.

He had sent out a repair request to Irk weeks ago, so until an authorized drone could arrive to assist, he had to make sense of the problems on his own.

Zim sank into his seat at the workspace and gave the manual a half-hearted flick.

"I've looked at the PAK's components in and out; at least I think we can rule out physical damage."

He reached up to the tool rack to grab something like a screwdriver.

"Ah, well. Another look won't hurt."

It would be the eighteenth time he'd sat at this workbench to execute the same, fruitless investigative surgery, but by the seriousness of his expression as he pried the top-shell off, one wouldn't know it. He settled in, back aching, eye straining through work goggles, and went to work.

Over the long stretch of tireless labor, the only accompaniment to the clacking of tools came from the cavernous, isolated hum of the dome, and the echoes of distant drips and cracks in the earth from the constant, minute shifting of tectonic plates. Zim dissected, stared, vision blurred from overexertion. Over his lips, he began to unleash a stream of hostile, free-associating rambling, at first to complain about the pointlessness of returning to this task, then merely to fill the haunting emptiness of the underground. And while it started out under his breath, it grew in volume, until he very nearly shouted a crazed, ranting speech into the wall where he chucked his screwdriver.

"And-it-doesn't-even-WORK! But-they'll-pay, THEY'LL-ALL-PAY!"

Suddenly, a hushed flow of air whisked through the elevator chute. A chiming tone echoed through the elevator doors, and when they opened, out skipped an enthused GIR, cradling a tub of melting chocolate ice cream in his arms and humming a discordant, incessant series of notes. Minimoose floated in after him, dragging another dripping ice cream tub via hastily-fastened twine about its body. The two reached the examination table and made it host to their impromptu ice cream party while Zim continued to fret at his work.

Zim had given up and started slamming the PAK's metallic chassis back into place, though in his frustration and nattering, he kept laying them in the wrong order, thereby infuriating him all the more. He did what he could to ignore the annoying sounds invading his oratory senses: the giggling, the humming, the slurping of gooey cow juice. 

"Can't-even-tell-me-what's-WRONG!"

Slam. Crack. The fracturing noise startled Zim enough to knock him out of his stupor; he pulled back the current plate to assess the PAK's interior. Nothing broken. He sighed with relief.

"_ Um… Sir? Were you talking to me, or…? _"

"No, I wasn't! I was―GIR! Quiet down! Rrgh, I can't hear myself think!"

"_ ...Sir? _"

Zim wheeled around in his chair, froth-mouthed. "What! What is it!"

"_It is now six o' clock._" As if to tempt him, the computer pulled up a display of an outdoor view, complete with the hopeful glimmer of sunlight on morning dew and the ambient sounds of waking songbirds. "_For your psychological stability, I am recommending that you leave base today for the minimal monthly dose of stimulation and social interaction_."

"Hmm? What is the meaning of this!?"

"_ You have not stepped upstairs in over twenty days, and are beginning to show symptoms of Base Madness. _"

"Base Madness!? NON-sense! I'm perfectly psychologically stable! And I have plenty of social interaction down here!" Zim wheeled around and gestured at the sticky robot and its dim-eyed, moosey companion. "I have GIR, Minimoose, _ and _ Darryl!"

Zim's finger lingered and pointed at an empty spot on the floor. No one spoke.

The alien didn't notice the awkward silence, and laughed abruptly. He didn't notice, but his eyes twitched as he cackled, "Ha! Good one, Darryl." He then slapped his goggles back down and slumped over the console, chuckling in a woozy, debilitated manner. "You were always the funny one."

"_ Hrrmrm… Sir… _"

"Oh, put a sock in it! If I wanted your opinion..."

Zim might have launched into another vicious diatribe, but was interrupted by a tiny, needy tug on the hem of his uniform. His anger faded into a fog of confusion; he blinked heavily down toward the floor, where the glowing blue eyes of his robot met his gaze.

"Master, can we go play with Mary today?"

"H-huh?" Momentarily, Zim forgot how to interpret the thing's babble. "Oh. You mean the human." He turned to place the last piece back into its socket and lift the PAK for reattachment. He scolded in a distracted manner, "We don't 'play' with him, GIR. He's my mortal―"

"But I miss him!" GIR whined.

The PAK wobbled, rose, and automatically fastened its cables into his spine. Zim decided to interpret GIR's words in a way it didn't intend. "You're right. The Dib has been eerily quiet as of late." A thought brightened his outlook; this was a chance, he hoped, to break the monotony of his current state. "Perhaps he's cooking up some plot against me."

"Maybe he's on vacation!" GIR suggested.

This was a strangely cognizant idea for GIR to think up on his own. But as fate usually had it, GIR's rare moments of lucidity came only when Zim's ignorance prevented him from appreciating it. Zim scoffed at the robot's answer. "Vacation? What are you _ yammering _ about?"

"Be-… because it's _ summer _!" GIR answered, this time less self-assured. He popped up onto his feet, invigorated by his imaginary scenarios: "Maybe he's at the beach! Or eatin' hot dogs!"

"Everything's hot dogs with you lately," Zim griped, not bothering to conceal his disdain. He then noticed sweat stains seeping through his uniform and decided to freshen up, so he plodded to a steel-doored closet on the other side of the hall and slid open a compartment containing a row of identical suits. As he changed, he thought aloud, "Though something about this 'summer vacation' is starting to remind me of something. Computer! Do I have any research notes on this?"

"_ Yes, sir. _"

Zim tucked his tunic and neatened his collar. He glanced curiously upward when nothing was said after a few moments.

"_ Oh, did you want me to…? _"

"Yes!"

"_Sorry, you didn't... actually say―oh, whatever_." The main display screen lit up with helpful, grade-school level graphics: a happy smiling sun, a boxy red school building, grinning stick-figure children frolicking in a field. The computer's voice lifted as it had a chance to educate. "_Summer vacation is a period of three months when Earth schoolchildren are relinquished from the public school schedule. Many use this time period to engage in extracurricular sports or clubs, travel to outside regions, visit family, work temporary jobs, or simply relax with leisurely activities._"

"Of course, of course. Ugh. 'Leisure.' As if these man-pigs need another excuse to roll in their own filth." Suddenly, Zim decided he could look through his archive to find inspiration. "Computer, remind me of the important tasks I completed last 'summer.'"

"_Last summer, Dib and his family went on a road trip through the Midwest. You disguised the Voot Cruiser as an Earth vehicle and followed them. During the trip, you came across the Biggest Ball of Twine and declared your intentions to… er… use its power for evil?_" The computer's incredulity caused it to pause before admitting, "_I have documentation_." A photograph of Zim grinning and posing besides the comically-humongous twine-ball appeared. To a layman, he would appear to be no more than an easily-impressed civilian having landed in a tourist trap.

"Ah, yes. That plan was wildly successful, if I recall correctly."

The computer cleared its throat and flashed another picture on-screen. This photograph had been taken mere moments after the first shot: the ball of twine budged only a few feet, and all that remained of Zim's figure were his spindly legs sticking out from beneath it. "_Sir, that is a negative_."

"No, no, no! I―I meant what happened _after_ that!"  
"_Umm… You were arrested by Earth authorities for piloting a vehicle without a license. Dib's father arranged your release, and you were forced to join your rival for transportation back to base._"

The picture on display spoke magnitudes. Zim, squished in the back seat of the Membrane's car, sandwiched between a sour-faced Dib who seethed and glowered out the window, and the surly sister, whose attention was completely sealed on a handheld device. The Zim in the picture had two thumbs up and an ill-suited grin on his face. Current-Zim then split his own lips into a nasty smirk as well, and he gave his countertop a whack with his balled-up fist. "Yes! I successfully wasted those puny humans' time and resources."

"_Uh… Right. _"

"I got to ride shotgun!" GIR recalled, chocolate ice cream now smeared across his lips and chest. "Then I got to RIDE A LLAMA!"

Zim, instead of being annoyed by the robot's exaggerated glee, piggybacked: "Yes, yes! AND I managed to steal some of the humans' precious 'twine'!" (He nodded to Minimoose, whose belly still had twine wrapped about it like a prized ribbon). "Truly a day of victory for the Irken Elite."

Somehow, this trip down memory lane reinvigorated his zeal. He leaped to his feet.

"You know what? Maybe delivering another sound defeat to that melon-headed fool will cheer me up after all! C'mon, GIR. Fetch the new plasma cannon."

* * *

A few steps into the great outdoors, and Zim almost confessed that he had needed the trek; in the early, sleepy hours of the morning, a dream-like shadow cast over the neighborhood, and the air felt fresh and new in his lungs compared to the recycled oxygen of his underground quarters. As Zim started his way down the street, with the squeak-toy steps of his green dog behind him, he eyed the houses he'd memorized with his impeccable Irken memory. He knew the residents, the slave animals, the blueprints, the weaknesses. Not that any of this came in handy―never had any of them proven more than temporary annoyances. But it soothed him, this counting, this endless planning for incoming attack.

Unfortunately, after a few blocks, the sun crested over the horizon and began to roll its punishing tide on the street. It boiled at his feet, then crept up his legs and eventually flared across his chest, bathing his frail body in solar radiation. The air, which felt fresh before, soured with thick moisture and city musk, becoming itself a cloud of inescapable heat.

The walk became a regrettable slog. Zim had to slide his wig into place more than once as his scalp softened with slippery grease, and his contacts started to itch more than he'd ever remembered. When he reached the boy's residence, he could swear the bottoms of his boots were melting and congealing to the cement, making every step miserable.

"Stupid Sun," he uttered, shooting the hateful, eternally-combusting star a resentful, but indirect, glare. His mouth felt parched and leathery as he vowed, "It'll be the first thing to go."

Zim redirected his gaze to the nondescript facade of Dib's home. The house seemed quiet. The windows shuttered, the lawn a crisp brown, its paint cooking in the sun.

He didn't turn around, but positioned himself with fists at his hip. "GIR! Let's give the humans a proper greeting! DEPLOY THE CANNON!"

"Okee-dokee!" GIR thrust the bulky, chrome-colored weapon up from the street, upon which it had been unceremoniously dragged, and balanced it in a precarious manner upon his tiny costumed shoulder. He pointed for the front door―and fired.

A burst of sparks, then a sputter, then a sad, limp stream of neon-blue fluid trickled out, forming a puddle of luminescence at GIR's feet.

It took Zim a moment to realize something had gone wrong; when he whirled around, he found GIR snickering, spewing the plasma in the air, and dancing maniacally as drips landed on his costume.

"Ehehehe! It BURNS!"

"GIR! Did you wear out the battery?"

"Umm…"

(Behind him, as a testament to his irresponsibility, there was a path of wanton destruction: smoldering holes in the sides of buildings, toppled light-poles, craters in the road).

GIR shifted his eyes and answered innocently, "No."

Zim swallowed an irritated growl. "No matter. We'll just have to resort to classic Irken guerrilla tactics."

This, apparently, meant rolling, flipping, dodging, and creeping up the walkway until he reached the door… and then ringing the doorbell. His excitement tingled through his fingers, and he couldn't help but bounce on the balls of his feet, like he was ready to pounce on the first living thing that appeared.

Five seconds of waiting, and he was ready to curse and smash the door open. He growled and punched the doorbell a few more times. _ Ding dong, ding dong, ding _―

Finally, the door opened, revealing not a human of comparable height, but a towering figure in a white lab coat. At the very top of this ivory tower, a man's face was obscured by the over-important stiffness in his collar, with only the gleaming black goggles visible. In the figure's hand, a boiling mug of coffee simmered, pouring out steam like a frothing cauldron.

The voice rang out from under the coat, its tenor full and grand. "Ah! Dib's little foreign friend! What a pleasant surprise! How are you on this fine morning?"

Zim impatiently attempted to glance around him and into the kitchen. He had no business with the father. Zim had always reserved a wary respect for the man; the madness and intensity of his scientific passion could only be called _ Irken_. But over time, Zim had also come to recognize the scientist as selectively dull-witted. In interacting with him, Zim depended on the same tired, played-out lies, and the professor never so much as blinked with suspicion.

With the dramatic events of the near-apocalyptic encounter with the Florpus Hole, Zim worried that Membrane would continue as a serious rival. The alien still had horror-memories of the father and son decimating his automated army. But, after the ashes settled, the self-delusion returned, and just as promptly as the planet snapped back into its correct coordinates, the man again treated Zim as an oddball foreigner.

Zim sometimes wondered how it was that a dense being like this was capable of producing a child who saw through his ingenious human disguise from day one. Perception, he could only speculate, must be a maternal genetic trait.

Zim played along as usual with a formal salute―a habit in addressing authority figures. "Greetings, Father of the Dib! I was out walking my normal-looking dog, and I thought I'd stop by to visit. Is your husky-headed child home?"

Professor Membrane's countenance slumped a little. It was hard to tell under the lab coat collar and goggles, but he seemed downcast. "Sorry, little boy! Dib will not be able to play with you today. You see, both he and his sister have gone off for a two-week stay with my―" He buckled over, gripping his chest as if in massive pain. "―_Horrible _ hippie sister." He shook a morose head and spoke gravely, "I can only hope they don't return vegetarian."

"Oh. What a shame," Zim said, still dripping his voice with false camaraderie. He did feel a strain of genuine disappointment, though. "I _ really _ need to see him. Couldn't you lend me this person's coordinates?"

"Oh-ho-ho! No can do! My sister lives in some kind of backwater commune untouched by modern concepts like 'addresses' and 'vaccines'! You'll just have to wait until he comes back." He lifted his mug in a motion of chipper farewell. "Good luck out there! And just so you know, I think your perfectly-normal dog is on fire."

"Yes, yes," Zim acknowledged without concern, only flitting his eyes briefly back on GIR's smoking form. "He does that."

Zim told himself this was not a disappointing development. So Dib wasn't home. The alien hadn't seen him in ages, anyway, so this temporary setback meant nothing to him in the long run.

"Pah! This is good news," he assured himself. He tugged on GIR's leash and ignored the caustic plasma-scorch smell as he ventured back to the curb. "It gives me time to plan his demise."

When he sat on the curb to rest his feet, he felt the miserable, radiating heat sear his behind. He scowled out into the flash-fried jungle of suburbia and tried―failed―to imagine the passage of two weeks. Yes, he thought. When Dib returned, it would be truly a new chapter of chaos and war, unhindered by old, false promises. Thrill crawled up his throat like a venom. He could hardly wait.

* * *

"Ommmmmm…"

The taxi hit a pothole, jarring its passengers and sending them, briefly, aloft. Thankfully, seatbelts prevented them from slamming into the ceiling, but their luggage in the trunk could be heard banging about. The fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror bounced and spun, below the shadowy view of a cabbie's dull eyes.

The humming sound from the back seat hiccuped with this jolt, then rejoined with even stronger intensity: "OMMMMM…."

"Dib."

_ Mmmmmmm _…

"_Dib, if you don't stop that, I'm going to strangle you_!"

Dib opened his eyes. His sister's face was close enough to cloud his glasses with savage breathing. He swallowed and went silent, and she scooted back over to her side to resume playing with her GameSlave.

The two siblings continued the ride back home in bumpy silence for several minutes. Gaz, who had languished over the last few weeks without video games and internet (Aunt Nessie allowed neither in her house, on account of her belief that they 'controlled minds'), pulled out her game system the moment the taxi door closed, and stated outright that she intended not to go outside for several weeks if she could help it. Her mood had been especially foul over those weeks, and Dib tempted fate by so much as breathing in her direction.

Dib himself spent the first week crawling up the walls. No TV, no internet, no _ anything_. He smuggled paranormal magazines along to keep his wits about him, but his boredom led him to spend more time with his aunt, and something _ happened_.

Gaz called it Stockholm Syndrome. Dib called it a revelation.

"I was trying to get in my morning meditation," he explained to Gaz feebly, uncrossing his legs and dangling them over the seat.

"You can do your STUPID routine when we get home, and you can do it IN YOUR ROOM where it won't bother me."

"It's not stupid! It's important!" He pinched his forefingers and thumbs together. "It centers me!"

A hiss passed through her clenched teeth. "...I can't believe you managed to replace that dumb paranormal stuff with something _ even more annoying_."

"I'm not giving up the paranormal, Gaz. I'm just shifting my perspective." He spoke in his usual nasal, self-important fashion, albeit now with a strain of faux-spiritualism. "I've spent my whole life chasing the unknown, and it's only ever made things worse for me. So from now on, I'm focusing on the here and now. On being at peace with the universe."

"...Every word out of your mouth makes me wanna gag," she said, obviously not listening. Her fingers coiled sharply about her game console, threatening to snap it half. She swallowed some bile and droned, "Aunt Nessie gives you one yoga lesson, and all of a sudden you're the Dalai Lama."

"Hey! I'm serious about this!"

"Sure, Dib." Gaz leveled a glare at him, and almost considered arguing with him. Instead, she grunted, one eye pinned skeptically on his new attire, a leather headband with colorful gems. "I give it a week."

Her lack of faith in him was so normal, that he didn't allow it to sway him an inch. Dib understood now what he wanted with life, and he knew he wanted a big change. After all, the planet had narrowly escaped destruction, and it was _ his fault_.

Zim had given up. Surrendered. Dib saw now that he should have let it go, taken it as a victory, and allowed Zim to wallow in his defeat forever. Sure, Zim might have found some other harebrained scheme eventually, but at least Dib wouldn't have felt responsible for its coming about; his attempt at unmasking Zim's identity at the Peace Day convention only inspired Zim's most dangerous plan yet.

It had been a heartbreaking thing, realizing that his righteous war against the alien invasion had put the planet in more peril. Gaz had been right: his rivalry with Zim? _ Stupid _.

The aftermath of the Florpus Incident left him sulking and listless: it was, in part, the reason his father had booted them to the countryside. But Dib felt with unnerving certainty that the trip had, in fact, cured him.

A new lease on life! A new strategy! A new way of thinking! He couldn't stop grinning.

* * *

Upon reaching the house, Gaz wasted no time. She climbed out of the taxi, landed on the curb, and lugged her suitcase behind her. She reached the front door before Dib finished issuing the cabbie their payment; he looked over the quiet house as he slid to the ground, seeing that it hadn’t changed, and sighed. His own bag dragged across the sidewalk, a heavy burden that only reminded him of the work he had ahead. It would be easy to slide back into his room and fall back into old habits, so he internally steeled himself for the temptations that would surely surround him. He had to stick to his plan. _ Had to_. No matter what.

Which meant he needed to deal with…

Dib paused suddenly. The stop came instinctually at first, a paranoid twitch that could happen out of thin air. But after a moment, he heard something stir. To his left, one of the hedge bushes rested in the dark shadow of the early morning, and his eyes tracked it in suspicion; sure enough, something was rustling. It could be a squirrel or a bird. Or it could be something HORRIBLE.

_ I need to stop thinking like that_. Nonetheless, he plucked a stray stick from the ground, approached the shuddering, leafy lump, and listened carefully. He could make out mumbles, but it could be anything, couldn’t it?

At a healthy distance, Dib jabbed the stick into an opening and hit something tender. No response. He jabbed again, a little harder this time, eliciting a grunt and a crunch of some sticks and leaves. Then, without warning, a green, scratched-and-scraped head and torso spilled out of the hedge and onto the ground, its human-ish eyes blearily blinking up at him.

Dib screamed; the startled alien screamed; GIR leaped out of the bushes to do a joyful jig.

A few rounds of shrieks later, Dib finally recognized him and caught his breath.

“AHHHhh-ooh, wait. It’s only you.”

Zim seemed disoriented at first, but he recovered and tried to pull himself from the hedge. He couldn’t. "Ah… Ah… Aha!” Zim, still tangled and struggling on his back against the knotted branches, shook a triumphant fist in the air. “Yes, it is I, Zim! I've caught you by surprise, filthy human child!"

"Actually, we kinda surprised each other," Dib corrected. "Have you been… camping out in the bushes this whole time?"

“What? No! Of course not!”

GIR meanwhile waddled over to Dib to tug on his coat. He held out a vaguely-sandwich-shaped apparatus dripping with cheese. “Hi, Mary! I made S’mores! Want one?”

Dib gingerly pushed the robot away. “Okay, Zim, you were obviously waiting for me. For… A while. What do you want?”

“I—want—ugh!” Zim gave out last thrust, and freed himself from the bramble. He tumbled then sprang to his feet. “What I always want! To destroy you and your pitiful planet!”

The alien posed, awaiting Dib’s pathetic retort. But none came. The bespectacled young Earth boy stood there on the sidewalk, face blank, battered suitcase behind him, jacket fluttering a little in a morning breeze.

“Ah…” Zim twisted his feet, agonized by this strange suspense. Dib had never taken so long to scream back at him. When he couldn’t take the tension anymore, he leaped for action. "GIR!" He frantically reached out with his arms in the robot’s direction, pumping his talons in the universal 'gimme' motion. "The cannon! Hurry!"

"Oh, I don't have it no more." GIR pointed cheerily up into the branches of a nearby tree. "I gave it away! To a nice family o' squirrels!"

“You what! You _ imbecile_! Fetch it back!”

“Aww, but Master! They’re using for their nest!”

“I don’t CARE, GIR! That’s a class-A weapon they’re stuffing leaves into!!”

“Um…”

Zim seized up and jerked his head. The boy was at last speaking; he stiffened in attack mode in the human’s direction.

But rather than return Zim’s hostility, Dib looked rather calm, almost assuaging. He lifted a hand in surrender and gentle interruption. “Hey, Zim? Before you get on with… Whatever this was…” Dib frowned as he lost track of his words and scratched the back of his head. "You know, it's a good thing you stopped by. We… have to talk."

This suggestion made the Irken burrow his gaze into the boy’s head. He almost thought he understood when he cackled and waved a claw. "Is it about that absurd-looking thing wrapped about your enormous head?"

"Oh, this? It's a focus bandana. My Aunt Nessie told me it helps balance my chi."

The Irken slacked his jaw and grunted his lack of comprehension. "Hah?"

As much as Dib wanted to, he couldn't maintain his expression of serene solemnity. He frowned, both defeated and embarrassed. "Er… Okay, so I don't _ really _ believe in that stuff. But it does help me focus!"

Like an infant spotting another playing with a shiny new toy, Zim felt an irrational desire to steal it.

“Anyway, yeah, that’s kinda what I need to talk to you about. Something’s… come up.”

Zim saw the seriousness in his face and decided this must mean a long, dull diatribe was about to be delivered. He groaned. “Alright, on with it, then. Tell me what you must.”

“Well, I just got back from this trip, and it’s been a real eye-opener. I never got to spend much time with my Aunt Nessie growing up, but after spending some time with her, I realized I like her. She listens to me. She doesn't _ believe _me or anything, but at least she doesn't call me crazy."

"Uh-huh." Zim already looked petrified with boredom. His booted toe tapped on the sidewalk and he cast an irritated look off into the distance.

"She noticed how stressed I was and taught me some stuff to help me calm down. Like breathing exercises, tai chi, mindfulness―"

Zim piped up incredulously. "You had to be _ taught _ how to _ breathe_?"

"Anyway, it all came together when we took a trip to the beach. Normally I don't swim or do much of anything when I'm there, but this time, I decided to make a change. And you know what I did? For a few minutes, I actually stopped to enjoy myself. I even stopped trying to hunt down the local beach yeti, and just―looked out at the ocean, and took in the view. The waves… The white sand… The seagulls overhead… The island of plastic waste drifting by..."

As Dib blathered, Zim had settled his behind on the grass and yawned. "Does this hideously boring story have a point?"

"It was nice, Zim. Just being in the moment, not worrying about stuff."

Had Dib delivered this impactful message to another human, he may have received an understanding nod or two, or at least some empathy. Who in the human race didn't crave a moment's reprieve from the stresses of the everyday?

But Zim was an Irken, programmed and bred to care, and to care so hard that sleep had been banned from their genes, leisure stricken from their schedule, and peace extracted from their brains. The thought of pausing was a horrifying one, a step closer to demise. So Zim neither understood what he meant, nor where this was all leading. The Irken could not remember the boy ever speaking this way before, and this fact alone unnerved him.

_ A trick_, he thought. _ Some crafty human trap_. He kept a hand at his hip, near a holstered blaster. It wouldn't evaporate the human like the cannon, but it would put a hole through him, if need be.

"What are you saying?" Zim finally asked, spitting it combatively.

"What am I saying? What am I saying…?" Like this was an elaborate math puzzle, Dib tapped his chin, clutched his head, and rubbed his neck. "I _ guess _ what I'm saying… is I quit."

"Quit." Zim had to manually search for the word; it literally was not in the Irken vocabulary. A strain of excitement filled him when he interpreted its meaning. "You mean, you surrender?"

"No, it means…"

"THAT MEANS I WIN!" Zim paraded about the yard, arms in the air. "ZIM IS VICTORIOUS!"

Dib stared, then shook his head in defeat. He lifted the handle to his suitcase again, readying himself to move for the house. "You know what? That's fine. I don't care."

"I'll decimate this heap of rock and dirt! I'll make its inhabitants crawl on their bellies! None shall escape my iron fist!"

Dib shrugged and pressed the front door open. "What happens, happens."

"And―" Zim paused his rant; the rhythm suddenly felt all wrong. He gave GIR a desperate glance, then started a feeble list on his claws: "And, and I'll enslave your children, and stuff your cattle with melted caramel, and―"

The front door of Dib's house slammed shut.

Zim leaped. In his alarm and confusion, he gawked at the empty stoop. His breathing staggered as if something had punched him in the gut; he released a quick pant and scurried for the door. Like his life depended on it, he hammered a finger into the doorbell in succession.

_ Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-dong_.

On the other side of the door came a reluctant sigh. The knob clicked, but the opening slid open only a sliver, wide enough to reveal Dib's exhausted face. "What?"

"I―!" Zim stomped on the stoop in a childish tantrum, and even his voice took on a whiny tone. "I wasn't done!"

"Zim."

"SO AS I WAS SAYING, I'm going to boil your oceans, launch your monuments into space, turn your trees―hey, are you writing this down?"

"No. No!" Dib flew the door open, stalked out, and pushed Zim from the stoop. "Geez, what are you not getting, here? This!" Exasperated, he motioned between the two of them. "This is what I'm quitting!"

"Oh," Zim squeaked, as if he'd just cracked the riddle. He sounded almost… vulnerable. "Oh, I see."

For a pained moment, neither spoke.

"You're not going to try and stop me," Zim said.

"Yeah, I'm moving on," Dib answered, again gripping the door with an intent to slam it in his face. "I'm sure you understand."

"WAIT!" Zim rushed the doorframe and pinned the door with his arm; Dib gave it a firm push but Zim, small creature though he was, had the strength of an elephant when he wanted his way. "What is it really?! You don't think I'm a threat anymore? Is that it?"

"I'm not saying that! I'm saying―okay, maybe that is what I'm saying!" Dib, feeling a headache coming on, nursed a sore spot on his forehead. "I mean, it _ has _ been different. Especially now that I know there's no invasion coming."

"Wh-who?" Zim erupted into a snarling roar. He snagged Dib by the coat and screeched, "WHO TOLD YOU THAT!? IT'S A LIE!"

Dib, baffled, reminded him, "You _ told _me! You said the Armada isn't coming! Remember?"

"F-fool! Of course I remember! But y-you see―" The hesitation drenching his expression gave away the gravity and lameness of his lie: "My Tallest were so impressed with my newest plan, that they have changed their minds! They'll be here any DAY now!"

Only because they had been down this road countless times, Dib crossed his arms and lifted an eyebrow. "Okay, what is it?"

"Huh?"

"Your amazing plan."

Silence. Sweat trickling down Zim's brow. A bird flew overhead; a stray dog plodded down the street, stopped briefly to sniff at the trash can, and moved on. At last, Zim answered thinly. "It's a secret."

Dib looked unimpressed, then irritated, then, finally, a little pitying. In a conciliatory gesture long unpracticed, he reached out and patted him on the shoulder. "Look, Zim. We won't be enemies anymore, but we can still be not… liking… each other… guys. And when summer's over, we'll see each at school, and you'll still be an alien hellbent on world domination, so…?"

But by now, Zim was huffing in monstrous, aggravated breaths, and smacked the boy's hand away. "Don't give me that drivel! There's someone else, isn't there? ISN'T THERE? Some sort of bigfeet? Or tentacle monster? NO! YOU'RE HUNTING PIG-BOY, AREN'T YOU? CONFESS!"

Somehow, Dib became aware of the absurdity of this exchange; he narrowed his eyes and glanced past the Irken to see that its robot sat on the grass, watching them fight while it munched from a bucket of popcorn (where did it get that?). Dib took the door in his hand one last time. "Goodbye, Zim. Have a good summer. Also: get off my lawn."

This time, when the door shut, Zim drummed his fists on it. "Never! An Irken does not retreat!"

But the sprinklers sputtered on and began their morning spray across the lawn, and retreat became the only option.

* * *

Anger.

White-hot, screaming anger that laced his blood.

Zim had not been this angry when he found out the Tallest had deceived him and the Armada would never reach Earth. He had felt defeat and self-blame, and a sense of having failed his leaders―they gave him a false job because he hadn't proven his worth. But not anger. His programming harshly and definitively suppressed any such feelings against a superior officer.

But Dib, an inferior being, _ rejecting _ his status as a threat? Tossing him aside as a mere curiosity, and not as the next potential Emperor of this godforsaken planet?

Down in his lab, he smashed vials against a bare wall, creating a shower of broken glass.

"He'll be sorry," he vowed. He tore a stack of plans toward him on his desk, shredding through them at furious speed. "When this summer season is over, I'll show him _ exactly _ how dangerous I am! He'll rue the day he crossed ZIM!"

He pushed a blueprint aside and found what he was looking for: his list. The task list ran for some forty or so items, all ideas for his inevitable reign over the Earth.

He grinned and began from the top.

_ Some time later _…

A massive array of completed projects lined the workshop, some morbid, some bizarre, some laughable. There were tools, weapons, bioengineered creatures in tubes. If anyone would claim Zim had lost direction, surely this would prove them wrong. No, he'd become _ more _focused with the boy out of the way. Why, Zim began to feel he wouldn't even need to wait out the summer before he could dominate the planet for himself.

With a final seal done on the metal seam of his latest satellite launcher, he cut off the soldering tool and lifted his face-mask. He whistled in marvel at the chromatic sheen. "Well, that's it. I think that's the whole list." 

To check, he skipped over to his work-desk, pushed aside his latest paperwork, and unveiled the pad. He flipped to page two, scratched off the final item, and dropped the pad on the floor with an air of finality. 

Then, he followed suit: felled by misery, he collapsed to the floor face-first, and smeared his sticky cheek on the metal tile with a moan. "Oh, how much _ longer _ will these _ awful _ months continue?" He gnashed his teeth against his knuckle, fighting tears of despondence, and demanded, "Computer, how many days has it been?"

Sounding surprised, the system answered, "_Sir, it's only been seven hours_."

"WHAT!?"

Before he could summon the right curses to launch at the computerized voice, he noticed a peculiar itch started at the base of his back. No, not an itch. A compression, a burning pain. A carbonated, sulfuric smell; a sizzling sound; a whining noise, like a fan over-exerting itself.

"Ow-ow-ow-OW!" Within a split second, Zim recognized the feeling and punched the command for an emergency detachment; his whirring PAK whipped across the floor, then wobbled in place like a lolling, empty bowl. As Zim clawed at the seared flesh at his back, he screeched furiously, "Computer, coolant tank, now!"

The computer didn't even confirm the order, but shot out an arm, snagged the overheating PAK, and flew it across the science wing. A tube of murky liquid popped its top, and the arm plunged the PAK inside. A rumbling, throaty hiss bubbled to the top, and a noxious, milky cloud of steam spilled out and onto the floor, where it quickly dissipated. In seconds, the heat dispelled and the PAK floated in peace, its shellface a ghostly, pulsating figment in the still coolant tank.

Zim took a brisk jog down the hall to catch up to its location, but if it was anything like the last few times, the PAK would take a minute or two to unjam itself.

"Again," he observed bitterly. He scritched uncomfortably at a seam in his back skin. "What on Irk is going on?"

"_I am not qualified to diagnose the problem._"

Zim was tired of that answer. "Okay, but can you guess?"

The computer considered this, and allowed itself some leeway. "_Based on your most recent PAK malfunctions, it is likely there is an error in your internal memory drive. It may be over-capacity._"

"Over-capacity!" Zim pressed his eyes up against the cloudy glass, and watched the red-hot device steadily pale in the coolant gel. "How's that even possible?"

"_Unclear. But when the PAK-repair drone arrives, it will be able to diagnose the issue, and defragment and clear memory space. _"

Zim snarled a bark of frustration. He struck the tank with an errant, violent blow of his fist.

"_Shall I send another repair request_?"

"What good will that do?! It's obvious at this point that no one's coming!" Steaming, Zim scanned the vast, empty chamber. All the equipment afforded a top Irken Invader, and what could he do? He couldn't escape a growing feeling of helplessness and isolation, feelings that Irkens were not accustomed to. A small shiver reached his spine. "Computer, explain again the parameters of PAK repair."

"_Only the Control Brains and their drones have authorization to edit, encode, erase, or repair PAK coding. Any Irken intelligence--whether organic or artificial--that attempts these actions will experience a memory short-circuit and forced refresh._"

"Should I at least try it?"

"_You've already tried. Several times._"

"What? I don't remember―"

"..._Precisely, sir_."

"Is _ that _ why I have that permanent metallic taste in my mouth?" He didn't wait long enough to receive an answer. "You said _ Irken _intelligence, didn't you?"

"_Yes._"

Zim at times lacked precision in his thinking, as well as foresight, as well as self-awareness. But Irken problem-solving was a deep-rooted thing, able to express itself in even the most broken of its species. Zim forced his circumstances through his measly organic brain, and once he recovered his PAK from the coolant tank and reattached, he was able to make his decision.

"Very well," he declared. "I have a plan. It's a dangerous plan. It will require all my cunning, all my finesse, all my elite military training."

"_You don't mean _…"

"Yes, I do!" He pulled out a drawer, admired an elaborate lock mechanism, and tapped in a code. A whirring of gears opened the drawer's contents: a red notebook with cryptic Irken writing on the front. "It's time for the nuclear option."

* * *

Up until now, Dib had never been much of a music aficionado; music interfered with his life's mission and would have drowned out the important radio signals, television shows, satellite pings, and other soft sounds that eternally reached _ out there_. He had no interest in the bubble-gum pop dance tunes or throaty croons of singers longing for lost love. At most, he'd only ever tolerated the most inoffensive strains of classical music, and even then, he avoided the pieces that swelled with too much grandeur or heart. Too distracting. Too sappy. He had work to do; he had to save the human race.

It was yet another reason his peers eyed him with suspicion and disdain. It certainly didn't make small talk any easier: What bands do you like? _ Oh, I don't really listen to music_. And they'd think, often aloud and right in his face, What sort of kid doesn't like _ music_?

Maybe, Dib thought, I'll start listening to music this summer. What an idea! Not that he had any idea where to start. He knew Gaz had stacks of CD's in her room, ready to thrash noise into her eardrums during especially long gaming sessions, but he worried her preferred genres would be… too intense for his delicate acoustic palate.

He wondered all these things while lying in bed, headphones having droned nearly thirty minutes' worth of Himalayan throat singing into his ear canals. It lacked any discernible tune, but after a half hour, a hidden musicality to it emerged from the outflow of his blank, unfocused mind. And it brought him there: _ I should listen to music, _ and then, _ I should really redecorate my room_.

His peace and quiet were broken unceremoniously when his sister slapped his door open, reached his bed, and jabbed him to attention in his tender side.

"Ow!" Dib sat up, earphones falling from his ears. "What?"

"Someone's knocking, and Dad says answer the door."

"Dad's not here."

Gaz did not seem deterred. "Well, _ I _said answer the door."

"Why don't you do it?"

"Because I'm _ busy_!"

Not too busy to reach his bedroom and pester him to do it, evidently―but he knew better than to resume the argument if he wanted to keep his limbs intact. He sighed, pried his headphones from around his neck, and plodded in defeat down the stairs and for the front door.

"It's probably for you, anyway," Gaz surmised from her bedroom door.

Dib let in a sharp, pained inhale. "Oh, please, no. Don't let it be―"

But as he passed the kitchen and approached the door, the loud, demanding, militaristic knocking had a certain, awfully-familiar tenor to it. And it had been evidently going on for an inhuman amount of time. _ Irken persistence_.

Dib felt dread and exasperation, but he knew ignoring it wouldn't work. He turned the knob, allowing the door to only open a crack.

And there was Zim, his eyes fluttering coquettishly, his voice as sweet and sticky as a melting fudge sundae. "Hello, Dib, my _ newest, best-est friend_."


	2. The Fair Trade

Dib had a few options, none of them good. He could call the police, but that might end with a full-on battle in his front yard, and he'd like to avoid that level of conflict. He could shut the door in Zim's face, thereby allowing the alien to continue knocking and haranguing him until he relented. He could even swing the door open, surrender to his demands, and welcome his new alien overlord.

But in those few seconds of thinking about it, he noticed that Zim came alone, no obvious traps surrounded them, and for some reason, the Irken had lugged a cheap, pastel-pink laundry basket onto his stoop. This was… unusual enough to get him curious.

So instead, he opened negotiations.

"I told you to get off my lawn."

For a flash of a moment, Zim's act crumbled; he screeched. "Filthy slug―!" He shuddered, swallowed, and brought his tone back to a purr. "Ahem, I mean, _ Dib_. How good to see you. As you can plainly see, I've come to see things from your point of view. I agree that our cat-and-mouse game has gotten tiresome as of late. In fact, I'm so inspired, that I, too, have decided to turn over a new leaf-limb."

"That's… um, great, but just because I don't want to be enemies doesn't mean I want―"

"YES, yes, you said things that you must regret: untrue things, harsh things, things that I will overlook for the sake of our budding friendship."

Dib recognized now that Zim was fully dedicated to not listening to him. He sighed and leaned his shoulder on the door-frame. "Uh-huh."

"I mean, can you believe it! It feels like it all happened just yesterday!"

"It was two days ago."

"Time sure has flown by!" Zim seized the basket behind him, grunting with the heft of it, and dragged it to the forefront. A cheesy grin and a trembling fist matched the majestic tenor of his announcement: "Behold! It is a BASKET OF GIFTS."

Dib's eyes scrolled down to the pink, plastic laundry basket in Zim's arms. He raised an eyebrow. "O… kay. You know, gift baskets usually aren't in―"

"HERE. YOU WILL ACCEPT ZIM'S OFFER!"

The cheap, hastily-assembled basket that Zim foisted into his hands featured items that must have been randomly snagged from an aisle at a gas station: assorted candies, snacks, and then tissues, cigarette lighters, batteries, souvenir keychains, and chapstick. Dib lifted his eyes to read Zim's eager-to-please expression. "Wow. You got us… things."

"Yes! So many wonderful things! And a puppy!"

"Huh? A pup―?" In his surprise, Dib stuck his face into the stash to search for any sign of the animal, and was rewarded for his nosiness with a loud, popping hiss, and a long, white, frazzled face snarling out from under a bag of roasted peanuts. The boy screamed, dropped the basket to the floor, and watched in mute horror as a miffed opossum fumbled out and began to waddle its way into the kitchen.

"Isn't he cute?" Zim clasped his hands together and made a suspiciously sincere squeal of glee. "I found him! In your garbage!"

"...Why were you in our garbage?"

(Zim sidestepped this). "I am going to forgive your rudeness at not expressing the appropriate, groveling level of gratitude I'm owed," he said, speech resonant with pompousness. "Now can I come in or not?"

The usual hostility in Dib's face faltered. He regathered the basket in his hands, more annoyed than pleased by the present, but when he recentered his attention on Zim's face, his shoulders tensed, then relaxed. "Normally, I'd tell you to get lost, because this is obviously some kind of ploy," he explained with heavy reluctance. His final answer clawed out of his throat, followed by a quakey sigh of surrender. "But... Aunt Nessie told me I should try opening myself up to new possibilities. To not let the past hold me back―"

"Yeah, yeah," Zim grunted and swept his arm into Dib's chest, knocking him aside on his way in. His shove knocked Dib off-balance enough to send him, and the basket in his hands, to the floor in a cluttered heap. "What have you got to drink around here, huh?"

As the alien likewise waddled for the kitchen, Dib collected himself. But rather than grouse and curse fate, he tried to take this in stride. "It's okay. I can be the bigger person. Erm, human. Whatever―I know what I mean."

Still talking to himself. Old habits die hard.

Upon entering the kitchen, Dib noticed that the possum had disappeared. Hopefully it didn't get into the vents. That's where the last two puppies ended up.

He saw Zim prying at the refrigerator door and grit his teeth.

"Hey! You're―"

Zim shot him a dirty, challenging look.

"--My guest. Why don't you have a seat? And tell me what you'd like?"

Zim, surprised at first and then wickedly pleased, complied with the hospitable gesture. He sat and waved a claw. "Yes, fetch me a cola, slave." 

Dib sucked in some air, and retrieved the drink in silence. 

The alien privately felt a strain of giddiness: so the boy's matriarch had brainwashed him into pacifism, too. The boy's new, doormat attitude would make him easy to dominate and order around.

But Dib plopped a cold can in front of him, found a chair opposite of him, and pointed out over a drink of his own, "You know _ friends _ don't call each other names."

"Eh? So?"

"You said you wanted to be―" Dib realized then he shouldn't be helping. He sipped and mumbled into his drink, "Never mind."

"Hm. Hmmmmm! Well!" Zim gave the can an inhuman sniff, and as he pried the tab open in practiced fashion, his pinpoint, false-blue eyes darted about the room. Because Dib gave him silence to fill, he tapped his fingers and began, "Your home seems... pathetic and smelly as always."

"...Thanks?"

"How's the family?"

"Great." Dib could feel his irritation and loathing compounding in his chest. He resumed flatly, "My Dad's not in space prison anymore. That's pretty cool."

If he meant this to be a jab at the alien's conscience, it obviously failed. Zim didn't even notice; distracted, he scratched at his chin and glanced around with sudden concern. "Hey, where's that clone I made for you?" he asked, as if he'd given it out of magnanimity, and not out of a devious plot to trap Dib in his own home. He actually sounded a hint _ worried _ at the lack of its presence.

Dib sucked in a sharp, uncomfortable breath between his teeth. "_ Oh_. That thing. Um. He…? Moved…?"

* * *

_It was a lonely, desolate road, surrounded on all sides with the ghostly figures of pine trees. No member of the Membrane family could see beyond the headlights of the car. The interior of the vehicle glopped and squished with what seemed to be the aftermath of an explosion of chocolate goo._

_ Their father was twitching as he drove, too troubled to clean off the gunk stuck to the side of his head. _

_ The clone, between the two children, hadn't stopped babbling with excitement. "Where we goin'? We makin' puddin' in da woods?" _

* * *

"To a farm. A nice farm… For clones… To go to..." Dib shook his head with wild abandon, knocking himself back into the present. "Uhh, look. I'm not sure what's brought this on, but―Zim? What are you doing? What's that notebook?"

Zim set his detailed plan notes on the table and began poring over them with a pencil in hand, starting with the first step:

  * _Custom #1: Give thoughtful gifts to friend_.

He eyed the basket at the door. Check.

  * _Custom #2: Share common interests with friend in order to form a bond._

Did 'wanting to destroy each other' count as a common interest? He was pretty sure it did. Check.

  * _Custom #3: Share food or drink with friend to solidify mutual dependency._

He nodded at the drinks sitting across from one another. Check. Wow, making friends with humans sure was easy!

  * _Custom #4: Create artistic representations of friendship._

Zim recalled this one clearly enough. The subject Keef had illustrated this technique to him many times during their trial sequence. Zim flipped through his notebook, blindly grabbed the loose sheet of paper nestled inside, and pushed it in Dib's direction across the slick surface of the table. "Now that we are _ friends, _ I have made an 'art' in honor of this momentous occasion. You may bask in my artistic _ glory_."

Dib, after giving it a cursory examination, paled and in fact turned a little green. "This... is a detailed diagram of you dissecting me."

Zim realized then he'd placed the wrong picture inside his notebook, but, unwilling to admit his mistake, he flew into a frothy rage. "Well, YEESH, I didn't realize I'd walked into the house of an ART CRITIC! Whatever! Look!" Zim snatched the picture back, scribbled haphazardly onto it, and shoved it back into his hands with an entitled gruff. "See! Now you're smiling! Because I'm… _ hugging _ your many, vile organs! Happy!?"

Dib winced and laid it face-down on the table so that color returned to his face. "That just makes it worse." He shoved it aside and leveled a steady glare at the thus-far bumbling Irken. "Zim. What's this about? Why would we ever be friends?"

"I've done the math. Over the last school year, we spent nearly six times more time together than the average 'friend' pair. We have more access to each other's personal intelligence: we know each other's likes, dislikes, critical weaknesses… We occupy similar rank in the local hierarchy, we share certain goals, and both of us have failed to form any bonds with our fellow, dim-witted classmates."

"Hey! Stop―" Dib faltered. "―Making... good points! A-anyway, even if I did look past the fact that you're an evil, sociopathic, soulless monster… I know _ you _ don't really want to be friends."

"What are you talking about, you stinking meathead! Of course I do!"

Dib clapped a hand to his forehead and released a huff of frustration. "You're just trying to butter me up because you need a favor. And newsflash: you're really bad at it!"

Zim slammed his fist on the tabletop, fracturing its surface. "You LYING, miserable worm! I am the greatest BUTTERER in the galaxy and I WILL NOT BE SLANDERED!!!"

"Would you just! Tell me what you want and get it over with!"

Irkens did not like abandoning plans, which was why, at this moment, Zim pulled his notebook into his hands, gave it a pained look, and dropped it reluctantly, snarling. His saccharine facade dropped; instead, he tapped his claws together in a business-proposal sort of way. Though his tone became more professional, he betrayed a strain of weakness in his opening line. "Alright, _ boy_. I'll level with you. I need a repair drone. Someone who can defragment my PAK's memory and install a new protocol address. I realize this is a task normally above the pay-grade of drooling primates like you, BUT, in our various clashes, I believe you have had contact with the Irken operating system."

"...Oh, yeah, Ubuntu."

Zim, not appreciated his flippancy, sneered. "I don't know what kind of man-voodoo you're referring to, but anyway, as much as it pains me, I need someone to assist with this minor repair."

"Wait, this is _ your _ technology. Why can't you do this yourself?"

"I _ can't _ do it. All Irkens have a built-in security measure that prevents them from editing their internal files and coding."

"What about your robot?"

"Besides the fact that he's a raving lunatic, no. No technology, organism, or artificial intelligence from the Irken Empire can touch it. Only certain, high-ranking repair drones have that authority." He wiggled his taloned fingers underneath his gloves. "But your grubby human hands should have no problem."

"That... seems like a dumb security loophole."

Zim squirmed, aggravated by this criticism. "Agreed, and I wouldn't be asking, except that... If I don't get this fixed, the consequences could be _ horrible_. This PAK executes my personality coding. Should it start to malfunction―! My usual calm and collected demeanor? Gone!"

_ Should I break it to him_? Dib wondered.

"My ability to hold laser-like focus on my plans and execute them with pinpoint efficiency? Out the window! My keen awareness of my surroundings―?!"

_ Mmm… Nah. _ "That sounds bad for you," Dib conceded. He pushed his half-empty can forward and hopped down from his chair. "But potentially kinda funny for me. I'll pass."

Right on cue, Zim flew into another tantrum. He bounced up onto the tabletop, rattling cans with his feet and shouting in grating peals. "Funny! Oh, it'll be funny, alright, right up until I go insane and eat your eyeballs out of their sockets!"

"You know what, Zim?" Dib couldn't fight it anymore; he thought he could put up with Zim's antics, but the longer this dragged on, the more he lost resolve. Aunt Nessie had taught him that _ he _ controlled his own energy, that he shouldn't let others force him into negativity, but _ she _ hadn't met the single most frustrating life-form on the planet, had she!? So instead of evolving, instead of dealing in grace and maturity, Dib allowed himself to be vindictive, petty, even cruel. "If you want it so bad, then _ beg_."

Mostly, he wanted to see Zim's reaction, and oh, did he get one. Zim hopped down to the floor in front of him and squealed with unbridled hatred. "I'd sooner die, you mucus-brained whelp! I would never stoop to _begging_ before an _inferior, _knuckle-dragging life-form such as you!"

Dib blinked, then looked over the dirt under his fingernails. "Gee, then, I guess this _ inferior life-form _ can't help you. I'm sure you'll figure something out, though. Right?"

"Yyyyy―ooo―-MmmMMM―-iiZZZeRRAAAHH―" It was as if Zim's anger had bound up into a knot lodged impossibly in his throat. He wheezed and hacked and turned a peculiar, purple-ish shade. The strain of his thinking, of his desperation, of the battle between his Irken pride and sense of self-preservation, for a moment threatened to rent him in two. But to Dib's surprise, Zim's legs twitched, buckled, and fell under him. The words gurgling from his throat were not so capitulating: "Look what you've reduced me to! An Irken elite soldier, on his knees―"

"That doesn't sound like begging."

"I _ AM _ BEGGING YOU AND I WILL RIP OUT YOUR THROAT IF YOU WON'T ACKNOWLEDGE THIS."

Amused and now nursing his soda again, Dib added, "Say 'please.'"

His claws twitched murderously, but joined together, interlocking in a quaking, but pleading pose. Like the word itself was a kind of bile to expel, he dry heaved, "_P, puh, p-l-e-a-s-e_."

Dib gawked, rapt, then snorted, causing a small, painful bit of cola to reach his nasal passage. He smiled through his wince. "I really didn't think you'd do it." He wiped his nose and took another gulp. "...It's still a no."

* * *

Dib made the mistake of turning his back on him, leaving him vulnerable to a fast, green missile of an alien body, which upon collision slammed his face into the kitchen tile. He felt his teeth chip and ring like piano keys; his vision spun. A furious screaming sound entered his ears. 

Zim, not concerned about fighting fair, snagged a lock of hair in his talons and started ripping it away from his scalp. The stream of howled insults didn't stop, even when Dib yelped in pain and forcibly kicked his way onto his back.

For a time, they wrestled on the kitchen floor, a pair of biting, flailing, threatening creatures, neither of which seemed able to land a fair hit. Zim finally gained the upper hand when he managed to scuff Dib's eyeglasses up his face, pinned him, and made a forceful, and frighteningly genuine, attempt at clawing out an eyeball. Failing to fish it out with his fingers, he lashed out with his teeth and tongue, as if he meant to snap it up like a ripe grape. When Dib squirmed and struggled to dodge the nips, Zim scolded, "SURRENDER YOUR EYEBALL, YOU HORRIBLE CHILD!"

"Gnahh! Get away from me!" A splash of mouth-goo made Dib recoil, screw his eyes shut, and gag. He finally forced a hand into Zim's face, shoving him away and narrowly missing getting a finger bitten off. "Agh, ew! You stupid jerk, you SPIT in my eye!"

"GOOD! I HOPE YOU GO BLIND! I HOPE IT MELTS YOUR―"

Zim's hysterics were interrupted by a hiss and a chomp; he screamed in pain and rolled from Dib's body.

As Dib stood to his feet, straightened his glasses, and blinked away the noxious drool, he realized that the opossum had not only appeared out of nowhere, but latched itself onto Zim's leg in a miraculous show of loyalty.

"Yeah!" From a distance, Dib jeered, "Good doggie! Goo'boy!!"

Fortunately for Zim, and less fortunately for the frazzled opossum, the alien finally kicked hard enough to dislodge the beast's jaw-grip on his calf, which sent the animal flying and then skidding on the kitchen tile. The blunt force of its landing caused it to stiffen up and play dead.

While Zim groaned and clutched his throbbing leg, the scuffle had since drawn attention from elsewhere in the house; a shadow cast over the doorway leading to the living room.

The both of them went as rigid as the marsupial. Gaz entered and, with but a single look, shut down their squabble.

"You two better cut it out," Gaz growled in warning. "Dad says no roughhousing inside." She pulled up the opossum by the scruff of its neck. The animal was still entirely stiff with its pink, drooling mouth agape. She mustered all the irritation she could as she asked, "Also, what's _ this _ thing doing in our house?"

Dib answered, "It's a 'puppy.' Zim gave it to us."

"It's hideous and it smells like death," she declared, unsmiling. A thud echoed through the kitchen as she dropped the paralyzed, unmoving creature onto the tile; it lay mangled and snaggle-toothed, its face wrinkled into a decaying grin slick with foaming spittle. Then Gaz snatched up its long, naked tail and began to drag its body across the floor, back out to the living room. "I'm naming it Ghoulie."

Well, Zim's gesture had impressed _ someone_.

With Gaz gone, Dib retrieved his most favored anti-Irken technology: a broom with a stiff wooden handle that could, when pressed against the alien's back, skid him across the waxy kitchen floor and toward the front door. Zim, his leg bruised and useless, could do little to fight back against such an assault, so he took to pitiful whining instead.

"Wait! Wa-a-ait! We can cut a deal, can't we?!"

"Not interested."

Zim's legs hit the open doorframe; he pinned to it stubbornly with his one good foot. "A trade!"

"I don't want anything from you."

"Surely there's something!" A brisk thump to Zim's spine catapulted him inches forward, until he had only his talons buried in the wooden frame. He grasped and heaved desperately, like letting go meant certain death. "You're the sort of pathetic monkey that gibbers excitedly at the prospect of getting new information. Right?!"

Dib had the broom handle square on his forehead, clearly meaning to jab him loose, but he hesitated. "What are you talking about?"

"DATA!" Zim sounded strangled. "I have loads of it! Just sitting around!"

Interest piqued despite himself, Dib tested the waters. "What kind of data?"

"Old battle plans, weapon designs, ship blueprints, reports, transmission files."

"What? I'm not stupid," Dib retorted. "You wouldn't give me that stuff!"

"It's junk archive files. Nothing useful for me, and definitely nothing of _ practical _use for a primitive race such as yours." As a last resort, Zim snagged the broom handle with a hand. "You can…! Have them…! For all I care!"

"I don't…" Dib sounded uncertain now. "Care about that stuff anymore."

"But it's all I ha-a-ave!"

Dib felt paralyzed by indecision. Either Zim didn't fully comprehend the weight of such an exchange, or he really was desperate enough not to care. Handing over intelligence to a hostile, alien force―as Dib would certainly be considered―was no act to be committed frivolously.

Dib, at this point, knew enough about PAK's to know they were important. Crucial, even. An Irken without his PAK was helpless and eventually a lifeless corpse. This meant inaction would, in time, lead to the Zim problem solving itself. Furthermore, what good would a data dump be, coming from a race that Earth would have no contact with in the foreseeable future? It seemed to him that he had no real incentive to cooperate.

Still, in the back of his mind, buried now in the clutter of new hopes and dreams, the wreck of Tak's ship lingered. Thoughts of life beyond, flickering stars, satellite images of foreign worlds.

In his mind, he justified it: if he did this, maybe he could convince Zim to leave him be. Maybe this was the last thing he had to do to settle matters once and for all, and Zim would then spend the rest of his existence quietly dithering in his base.

Also, and this might be an unrelated point, but Zim had obviously been practicing his puppy-dog eyes. It was impressive, really.

Dib sighed and, at least for the moment, lowered the broom handle. "If I say 'yes,' you have to stop digging around in our garbage."

Zim perked up, antennae twitching with excitement. Like a burden had lifted, he sprung up from his belly and stood confidently at the threshold. He crossed his arms. "I will make NO such promises."

It must have been a record: five seconds in, and Dib already regretted everything.


	3. The Partition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dib is not a computer programmer and probably should not be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M AN IDIOT.  
I DELETED CHAPTER ONE SOMEHOW. I CLICKED 'DELETE CHAPTER' ON WHAT I THOUGHT WAS A DRAFT.  
OH WELL.
> 
> Here's chapter 3 anyway!
> 
> Thank you to those who have reviewed and said kind things to me so far! I have not been in tune with the Zim fandom aaattt allll, so it's a bit like wading into unfamiliar territory. I hope you enjoy as actual plot happens and things start to get serious.

Just to be clear: both Zim and Dib met that fateful evening with the intention of back-stabbing the other.

Zim had his means. He possessed a dummy disk drive packed with terabytes of data, all of which was procedurally generated. Fake. Word salad. Diagrams of nonexistent equipment and impossible inventions. Irkens had a long, long history of guerrilla data warfare, because as a species they depended on memory files and digital communication. Layers of deception and fakery ensured the safety of their data, and trading off a faux-load in exchange for services was a smeet's first trick.

And Dib, for his part, had his own plans. A recorder on his laptop that would save everything he did; a remote memory drive that would automatically make backups of whatever he accessed. He knew this might be the only chance he had at seeing a PAK's inner-workings, and he was going to steal as much data as he could in the process.

Thus, that's how it started: Zim pretending he was willing to hand over data, and Dib pretending he was not about to plunder it.

Other than this impending double-cross, the night they agreed to meet at Zim's base looked to be normal. The weather cooled to a gentle heat, the sort traversed comfortably in shorts and t-shirt, if Dib were the type to wear either without the cover of his favorite black coat. The cicadas crooned their dusk song, stray neighborhood children punted a soccer ball away from the empty cul de sac, and some of the more unabashed residents enjoyed the mild evening by sitting on lawn chairs at their stoops, dressed in boxers or bathrobes. A residual, distant smell of roasting meat and beer carried over the fences of nearby backyards, as did the hum and thud of summer tunes.

Dib reached the silent, familiar house, that green-and-purple caricature of an American home, and took the sidewalk carefully. Zim's security gnomes rarely caused him much of a problem, and he had been invited over, but he couldn't count on Zim to disable the system when expecting guests. The boy balanced his sizeable messenger bag at his hip, weighed down with a high-grade laptop, and carried a bag of personal snacks and drinks at his opposite shoulder. He did not intend on consuming any of the… odd fare in Zim's kitchen, should the night go long and he became hungry.

The dead-faced gnomes swiveled their heads, but didn't blast him with lasers. A good sign. He reached the door, and after knocking, he was greeted by the robot, who tittered with glee at the sight of him.

"HI!"

Dib gave it a wary look. He never quite knew how to address the strange machine, except with uncomfortable politeness. "Uh… hi."

"You here for the sleepover?"

Dib furrowed his brow. "Um… Sleepover? No, there's not gonna be any sleeping―hey!"

He couldn't react fast enough; in a blink, the robot stole his bag of snacks, and whisked it off to the couch.

"That's mine! Give it―!"

When Dib knocked through the ajar door and fumbled into the living room, he found GIR already engorging itself on potato chips and munching while it watched the hideous visage of a monkey on the flickering television screen. Dib sighed, saw a can of soda rolling toward his feet, and picked it up as a consolation.

"Dib-stink. On time, I see."

The voice came from the kitchen; Dib turned his head and found Zim marching in goose-step, formal in stature and undisguised. He approached until he stood too close.

"You brought gifts for GIR," he went on. He sounded sincere. "How thoughtful of you."

Rather than argue, Dib accepted to accidental good graces. "Yeah, sure."

"But don't think I'm fooled!" Zim's finger flew out and hit Dib square in the chest, which caused him to flinch in pain. "I know better than to trust a slippery worm like you," he declared, flecking spit in his face. "Know that once this starts, there's password protection on my personal coding, so you'll only be able to edit my profile information. AND if you try anything, you can kiss those precious data files goodbye!" Zim did not wait for Dib to snark back; he spun on his heels to bark at his robot: "GIR! Stay upstairs and keep watch. We will not be interrupted."

"Uh-huhhh."

(By the way its eyes were glued to the screen, they both guessed this would not be a problem).

* * *

They didn't talk much on the way down through the elevator, and they didn't talk much on the walkway towards the central control console. Zim, on edge, shot his eyes back at him every few seconds, teeth snarled, but he pulled out an end table with a chair for Dib to set up, and for himself, he propped up onto a wheeled stool of some kind which allowed him free movement.

They sat facing each other for a moment.

"Uh…"

"...And whatever you do, don't TOUCH anything that shouldn't be touched! Or I'll feed you to my lab squid!"

Tired of threats, Dib settled in and opened his laptop. "Okay, I'm ready to get started. So, how do I... plug you in?"

Zim hissed and spat like a wet cat. "PAR-DON me?!"

"_ What _?" Dib lifted hand in startled, perplexed surrender. "What, I didn't―!"

"You had BETTER watch your TONE, this is THE ESSENCE OF MY VERY BEING THAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!"

Dib wondered then if there was some double-meaning he was missing, but he had the soundness of mind to refrain from asking. "But how am I supposed to…?" He motioned a plugging gesture into his laptop's USB slot; Zim's eyes watched his hand with deadly intent. The boy stopped when no comprehension crossed Zim's face. "Is there a… connecting… thingee?"

"That's...!" Zim fidgeted and crossed his arms defensively. "Personal."

"Oh, c'mon! You're messing with me, aren't you?" Dib shuffled out of his seat and approached Zim, ready to circle around him poke at the device himself to see if he could coax a connector cable out of it. "Let me…"

Zim was quick to put himself between the boy and his back; he lifted a foot to kick the human away. "Excuse me! Keep your slimy hands to yourself! I don't need your smell gunking up my processor!"

Dib should have known it wouldn't be that simple. This wasn't a mere computer chip to import; the PAK was the most sensitive material an Irken could possess. Zim's ability to cooperate was no doubt being overpowered by his instinct to fend off external intrusion. Still, Dib couldn't hold back a frustrated, "You ASKED me to help you! I can't do that without touching it!"

"You… obviously don't know what you're doing!" Zim squealed as Dib attempted to close the distance between them, and punted his foot square into Dib's chest. "Maybe this was a mistake."

Exasperated, but trying to be understanding, Dib backed off and gave Zim a glance-over like he was a piece of faulty equipment. "Isn't there… a manual or something?"

Zim stared at him, blank in expression.

"You know, for the PAK?" Dib paused, a thought occurring to him. "Or… maybe for _ you _?"

The alien grunted and spun back around in his chair. He hollered at the ceiling. "Computer! Turn on assist mode. I'd sooner trust you with this."

"_Uhhh_."

Zim tapped his heel impatiently, and spoke like a parent warning its child, "Com-PU-ter."

"_Allowing a non-Irken entity to access the PAK's memory… Is highly irregular… It is not recommended…_"

"Unless you've got a better idea, shut up and turn on assist mode!"

A bit of electronic mumbling later, the computer returned to exhale its exasperation and speak directly to Dib. "_ The human Dib. _"

"Just 'Dib' is fine."

A faint whirr processed this request. "_Dib. I have turned on assist mode. I will do my best to… erm… Assist you._" The computer, having already noticed their first impasse, intervened via a mechanical arm that reached down and interacted with the PAK's panels, plugging a button and extracted a hefty, snaked metal cable from one of its slots. The cord whined as it unspooled and fell limp on the floor. Then the steel-fingered, suspended arm turned in Dib's direction, like an attentive face. "_Technically,_" the computer said,_ "my programming parameters do not permit me to explain this process to you. However, while I cannot instruct you in the imperative voice, I _**_can_**_ read a description of these instructions in the second person_."

"...Huh?"

Suddenly, the computer made a sound like clearing a throat, and took on a lilting, genteel accent, as if it had seated itself beside a roaring fire, balanced a glass of wine in one hand, and opened a classic novel to read: "_As you look at Master Zim's PAK, you see a cable hanging from its apparatus and resting on the floor._"

Dib, understanding it now, plodded over to Zim's side, ignored the green alien's steady glare, and pulled up the weighty cable. It had a sharp spike at its tip, thick as his thumb. "Okay, what do I…"

"_You realize upon examining it that it won't plug into any Earth technology, so you cast your eyes about the work space in hopes of finding a converter cable. Under a large, purple desk on the other side of the room, you find a container packed with a host of wires and equipment; there, you find something that appears to fit it with an Earth Universal Serial Bus…" _

Dib, already on his knees over the plastic container overflowing with adaptors, mused aloud, "This isn't gonna be one of those things where I turn to page 24 and get killed by a vampire, is it?"

"_No… Of course not… Probably…_"

"Quit fooling around!" Zim squawked. "I don't intend for this to take all night!"

Dib suppressed a groan. He brought back the adaptor, gingerly hooked in the connecting cable, and was finally able to plug into his computer. A ping, and an external system appeared.

"_You open the command console. Irken writing appears on your screen. Your eyes flicker. Your hands shake with trepidation _..."

"Okay, stop! That's… Really annoying."

Zim quaked with discontentment, and kept narrowing his eyes in Dib's direction and stretching his neck with irrepressible nosiness. Not being able to see the boy's activities was driving him mad. "What is it!? What do you see!?"

"A bunch of text. Geez, will you relax?"

"It's Irken text! Surely, your monkey-brain cannot _ read _ Irken."

"No, I got it." With one stroke of his keyboard, Dib switched languages out. "Tak's ship had an Irken-English translator in its files. I downloaded it forever ago."

The computer, pleased, said, "_Ah. How resourceful of you_."

"Computer! You will abstain from complimenting the enemy!"

It accepted this scolding begrudgingly, and resumed its impersonal tone. "_First, you find and access his profile settings. There, a protocol identification number appears. You enter a reset command to encode a new ID._"

Dib, admittedly, only half-listened to this narration. He found himself poking for the rest of the directory. "Profile… Settings… Profile… Set-tings..." As he played dumb, he thought to ask, "Hey, uh, computer-guy? Can you see my screen?"

"_ Unfortunately, no. Why, are you having trouble? _"

"No! No, I… figured it out…" Dib took one more look at Zim, who rocked a leg back and forth over the seat and yawned. The human felt a small shiver of excitement―and, yes, trepidation.

First, Dib tried to surreptitiously access the command tree. Pulling up a directory list would tell him what was available. The system, though, caught the unauthorized command and bleated back at him that those subdirectories were password-protected, _ thank you very much _.

Then, a warning flashed on-screen.

>** _Warning: This system is protected by a factory default password. Change your password as soon as possible._ **

This…

This came as no surprise to him.

Dib craned his neck over the laptop's screen; Zim absentmindedly scratched his armpit as he waited.

The boy, on a whim, tried something: he typed 'password'

**>** ** _Incorrect password_****.**

He sighed. He didn't know why he thought that would work.

On a second whim, he then entered: 'password1'

…

>** _PASSWORD ACCEPTED._ **

And a streaming waterfall of green, garbled code spilled over his screen.

Dib plucked his soda from the counter, took a large swallow, and cheerily smacked his lips. Now, he was in business.

**id:PAK**

**├───.+source**

**│ └───personal**

**│ ├───disable**

**│ ├───biocomplist**

**│ └───set-param**

**├───profile**

**├───contacts**

Dib had to decide quickly which branch of the personal code he'd like to access; no doubt both Zim and the base's AI would grow suspicious if he spent too much time futzing around. He had no clue what a 'biocomplist' might refer to; biological composition? Computer? Component? In any case, a 'list' branch would only be for viewing purposes, and he had more sneaky intentions than that.

'Disable' caught his attention, though. He opened it.

> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/criticalthought"}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/conscience"}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/empathy"}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/ambition" (exempt:"set-param/mission")}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/rebellion"}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/altruism"}**
> 
> **disable:{branch="biocomplist/aesthetic"}**

_ What? _

Dib scrolled down, thinking the list would be restricted to a few items, but no, there were dozens. 

To his largely-untrained-in-Irken-coding eye, it _ appeared _ to be suppressant code.

This had never occurred to him. It had never even crossed his mind that an Irken could possess traits like this (_conscience? empathy!?_), much less that these traits could be _ inherent_, woven into the alien's biology, and only suppressed by several hundred lines of code.

What had Dib _ thought_?

Knowing nothing about the Irken homeworld or culture, he'd pictured a training ground, a propaganda machine that took in its citizens at a young age. Children lined up in classrooms, forced to recite the nation's agenda, punished if they stepped out of line, rewarded for repeating the party line. This form of brainwashing was understandable to a human, recognizable from history and, at a lesser degree, in local institutions. And while this would make a creature's slavish devotion to a destructive ideology somewhat understandable, it in no way erased its culpability. A person raised in a totalitarian system was nonetheless morally responsible for any atrocities they committed.

Apparently, though, Irkens did not have the privilege of brainwashing. They didn't have brains to wash. They were executable files. Lines of programming input.

Zombies? Captives? ...Slaves?

Indeed, one line read:

**disable:{biocomplist/branch="freewill"}**

Alas, Dib was twelve. And at twelve years old, these thoughts did not trigger the kind of existential horror such questions would cause in a mature adult. Instead, he felt a wave of astonished confusion, and then nasty curiosity.

_ I probably shouldn't do this, _ he had the sense to think to himself. _ But it could be interesting. Or at least funny_.

"Aren't you done yet?" Zim asked, aggravated beyond reason. "This is taking forever."

"H-hold on. My computer's… kinda slow…"

(He slipped his pinky quietly on the backspace, and watched code disappear from existence. Soon, the pace picked up; lines vanished. Then the whole disable branch, up in smoke).

"Urgh! I should have known your sad Earth technology couldn't handle this! There's more data in my PAK then all your puny computers COMBINED!"

"Oh, there it goes," Dib said. He had to level the shaking in his voice to sound innocent. The disable lines were all gone. A gaping void, like a wound, remained. He hovered his mouse over 'Save & Run' and held his breath. "Yup, got it… Just have to…"

He clicked. His heart launched into his throat. His vision went pink with anticipation.

A window with a red warning flashed. "Uh…"

>** _ERROR_**_: Fatal error detected. The biotic program will now be terminated. _

_ Fatal error? Terminate?! _Dib fumbled forward, knocking his chair over in the process. "Wait! Wait-wait-wait-no-no-no―!"

There was no death-rattle, no scream of agony, no sound of powering down. The program crashed, and Zim suddenly slumped where he sat, his head stuck at an awkward tilt, and his eyes blank, lifeless. 

An explosion of panicked, contradictory, and irrational emotions erupted from Dib's throat. He screamed.

"WAIT I DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THAT I SWEAR I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED AND NOW HE'S DEAD I'M SORRY I'M SO SORRY I'M NOT A MURDERER I CAN'T GO TO JAIL I'M ONLY TWELVE I SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAD THIS RESPONSIBILITY!"

"_You calm down,_" the computer narrated coolly. _ "You take a few breaths and realize he is not dead._"

Dib sucked in a few more gasps and slowed to a steady wheezing. He gripped his chest to compress the jackhammering force of his heart. "H-huh?"

"_He's unconscious. His system is shut down and merely needs to reboot. You check your command console_."

Blurry-eyed, Dib obeyed and pried the laptop close to his view. He saw:

_ >Restart command pending. Continue [Y/N] _

"O-oh! OH! Okay! Phew! Er―" Dib, trembling, pushed his glasses up against his face, and felt a slimy sheen of sweat rolling off his nose. He coughed and self-consciously corrected, "I mean, d-darn! Dang it, so close! To… getting that alien…"

The room was filled with silence. Apparently, Zim's computer didn't wish to dignify his terrible act with a response.

His voice still quavered weakly from shock. "You know, it's… not like… I would have cared… anyway… It would have been, like… good riddance..."

Still, Zim's computer would not acknowledge him. Instead, it blathered, "_The PAK memory drive must have crashed again. You should try to defragment as soon as possible._"

(Dib hoped the computer didn't have a lie detector setting). "R-right." He hastily pressed 'yes' and prayed the computer wouldn't make mention of what just happened.

>_ Restart successful. Default settings applied. _

Suddenly, Zim snorted, pulled his head up straight, and moaned like he'd awoken from an especially heavy nap. His lips smacked and his eyes opened unevenly, a show of severe disorientation. "H-huh? Did you say something just now?"

>** _ERROR_ ** _ : Recovery file of recent changes cannot be run. Would you like to restore the file? _

_ >Estimated time for download: 76h 11m _

"Nope! Everything's fine!"

>Y

>_ Downloading… 0%... _

_ >.01%... _

* * *

Rather than push his luck, Dib hurried to reopen the profile settings, reset the protocol ID, and pretend nothing had gone amiss. Fortunately, it only took a few clicks; it must have been the easier task of the two.

He couldn't keep his eyes from continually flicking back to Zim, as if he expected the alien to explode at any moment. His heart fluttered at every unanticipated movement. Would the experiment work? Would he… see something?

"Get to it, ape-breath," Zim said, dashing his hopes. "The memory defragmentation is next."

Dib shook his head and powered through. He had to finish this so he could go home and analyze what he'd gathered. The memory disk had a number of branches itself, but with minimal guidance, he found the diagnostic and marveled. "Geez. Your memory's at 103%. What is all this stuff?"

Zim, hearing this number, twitched nervously. "It... must be an error. Hurry up!"

Of the files before him, most seemed to be categorized as internal memory―saved accounts of his life, going back a shocking amount of time. Dib had never bothered to ask Zim his age, so seeing files run back as far as a hundred years forced him to readjust; he was in the presence of something _ old _, something that had been running amok before his grandparents were ever born.

Dib could have spent hours combing through these personal files, but he spied his own drive quietly backing them up. He would have time later. Meanwhile, he scanned for more interesting fare, which included a file labeled 'exe.part.' Opening it triggered multiple warnings against changing its files; it must have included boot images or something else important for the hardware. Dib had no idea what any of it did, so messing with it wasn't wise. Besides, he began to feel worried about the result of his earlier experiment, and he didn't want to add any trouble on top of what may come.

Nested deep in the protected partition, however, was a puzzling series of files listed in this manner:

> JASK.EXE
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy - copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy - copy - copy)

Dib knew this meant duplicates; even their file size was equivalent. A glance at the original file's info revealed nothing, except that the file was impossibly enormous, and its identical offspring had gone on to take up huge amounts of the disk's space. What this the problem?

"What's 'J.A.S.K.' stand for?"

Zim made no move of recognition. "Hah?"

"There's like… four duplicate copies of this file in here. It's weird. Is that supposed to be there?" He shook his head. "Well, they're duplicates, so―I'll delete one to clear some space, and―"

A split second after he made the deletion command, his screen crackled with frenzied activity: white lines streaked across his desktop; purple, red, and green pixels buzzed over broken tables; the screen froze, images and text bent and broken; a terrifying, hysterical whine strained his speakers. Then, a diminutive, non-threatening blip, and the screen flashed black and returned to normalcy.

Now the folder contained: 

> JASK.EXE
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy - copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy - copy - copy)
> 
> JASK.EXE (copy - copy - copy - copy - copy)
> 
> >Memory drive over-capacity at 110%

His eyes stayed frozen, gripped with terror on his view of the screen.

"Did you get rid of it?" Zim asked. He stretched a sore arm, like a well-worked athlete, and put on a snarled, braggadocious grin. "Phew, I feel better already!"

"OoOoOoh-h-kay, let's just… See if we can't… Open it, maybe?"

>_ Cannot run. Drive memory is overloaded. _

Dib paused, looked over his options, and took a breath to focus. He tapped his bandana, like it was a good luck charm. "So… So I can just extract it into your local memory files, and run it from there. Easy! Alright, that should-d-ď-ď-ď-⍝⍜⍍⍎,,

⌻⍋⍊

⍧… ⍥

🜗🜎🜙🜛, 🜯🜳🝂🝓🝧🜔?

D⌷te: 0⌷/2⌷⏀⍾/▐▐8⌷

⌽⍒⍡⍢, l⌷⌷ten ca⌷efu⌷⌷y.

_ … _

I ▐m giv▐⌷⌷ you ☐ n⌷w mi⌷⌷ion_ . _ I wo⌷'t o⌷⌷li⌷e th⌷s ▐ar. Bu⌷ yo▐ ☐ill. Thi⌷ c▐de wi⌷⌷ sur⌷▐⌷ve ☐n⌷ ⌷⌷mo⌷y w⌷pe Om⌷⌷☐rg can ☐uste⌷. An⌷ so ☐▐e ⌷ay… O⌷e d⌷⌷, ☐om⌷ ite▐⌷t⌷on ⌷f y⌷u… Y▐▐ c⌷n ⌷r⌷⌷g **p** ⌷ **ace** b⌷c⌷ to ⌷he u⌷ive⌷⌷e.

_ … _

** _Mission overwrite command sent_ ** _ . _

** _ERROR_ ** _ : Cannot overwrite mission. Extraction failed. _

** _ERROR_ ** _ : Fatal code conflict detected. _

** _ERROR_ ** _ . _ ** _ERROR_ ** _ . _ ** _ERROR_ ** _ . _

... who is this…?

W-w-h-h-o-o…

who IS THiS …

how did you gET HERE

… i-i-identify yourself IMmeDIATeLY

IDENTIFY.

SUBMIT YOUR COORDINATES.

IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT IDENTIFY SUBMIT

* * *

"...Crap… _ Crap _…!"

...

"Uh… Zim?"

…

"Are you okay?"

...

"Seriously… You're kinda… Freaking me out…"

…

"Okay… Okay, uh… Darn it, I gotta… Hold on… I'll be right…"

...

How much time had passed?

Zim didn't know. He couldn't say for sure that his limbs were in place, or that he was for certain alive and breathing. His body felt like lead, heavy, immovable. He kept trying to peel back his vision, open his eyes, but no light passed through, like all existence was being consumed elsewhere by some unstoppable force.

Noises drew in from a distance. He inhaled, and his lungs felt a thousand pinpricks of pressure where oxygen corroded his insides.

A faint image, something like memory but not quite, flickered in his cortex, translating into a vision of sludge, muck, drum-beats, the crisp flutter of wings, tubes, wires in flesh, hypodermic needles, screaming, silence.

When the smell of toxic slurry struck his nasal passages, he pieced together a burning in his throat and a slick mess in his face. He had vomited. When? Why?

Finally, his eyes burned with light. The doubled, tripled vision of the overhead lights made him so woozy that he forced his eyes shut again and, to his surprise, successfully moaned into the din.

"Master!"

A cheerful humming scurried for him. A soft, wet rag shoved towards his face-hole as the robot busily, and not very carefully, cleaned up the puddle of puke from the tile floor.

The floor. That's where he was. Cold linoleum on his cheek. His muscles clenched. He spoke eloquently: "NnnnrRRggghhRRHNnnnn."

"I made cupcakes! You want some?"

He opened an eye again reluctantly. He saw at least three GIR units circling his field of vision in fractals. "Wha… Hah, wha…?"

Then, Zim heard a voice coming closer. A familiar, nasal, irritating voice, through moist chewing.

"For a weird robot, your cupcakes aren't bad."

The alien slammed his palms onto the floor, heaved himself upward, and promptly crumpled into a dizzy heap.

"Woah, WOAH, Zim―! Easy!"

"Yeah! We can have the party now! Here's your hat!"

The room stopped spinning long enough for Zim to recognize where he was, but it clarified nothing for him. This was his living room. His back pressed against the foot of the sofa, and one of GIR's favorite cartoons danced over the television screen in swirling, nausea-inducing pastels. Zim twisted his head in the direction of the voice, and found the human standing there in the kitchen doorway, gawping stupidly at him, flecks of cupcake frosting on his chin.

The boy pushed away the robot, which wore a paper hat and tried, and failed, to foist another party hat into his grip. He sounded nervous, if not a bit concerned. "Are you… awake?"

"What… k-kind of STUPID question is that?" An awkward silence followed. Zim, by millimeters, dragged himself into an upright position. His vision still swam, and sounds echoed like voices had been plunged underwater. "F-f-foul human! What are YOU still doing here?"

"I… got hungry?"

"What… what did you DO!"

Dib didn't approach, but wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "Man, you were _ out_. For…" He glanced at his watch. "Almost two hours."

"Wha… what...." Zim swallowed a heavy swell of mucus, tainted with a strong metallic taste. He rasped angrily, with clear accusation. "What _ happened _?"

"Whatever that file was, it fried my laptop and knocked you out, so I had to go to my house to get another one. I came back and your computer helped me finish the other stuff... Then I dragged you upstairs, and that's… everything that happened."

Zim paused and let that answer settle on his weary brain. It was a strangely straightforward and dry explanation, without any hysterics of threats.

"Anyway… You seem… Um… Okay now."

Zim, rigid now with anger and a weary kind of fear, pressed his knees against his quivering chest. He huffed long, drawn out breaths.

After an uncomfortable measure of time, Dib realized that Zim did not intend to conversate. He cleared his throat. "It's… Really late… I should go home. I guess I'll… Come by to pick up that data some other time…?"

Outside, the din of midnight crickets shook the walls; Zim stared slack-jawed at the droning television, devoid of expression. GIR had skipped back into the kitchen, leaving them alone, which left Dib all the more ill at ease.

The boy started to step backward. "...Yeah, that's what I'll do… So-o… See you later."

And so Dib left out the front door―ran, almost, like a thief in the night. There was an admission of guilt somewhere in his hurried footsteps, but Zim was too unsettled to hear it.

* * *

Zim did not move.

For hours, his retinas burned with the entropic kaleidoscope of color and shape emerged from the red, green, blue blues of the pixels embedded in the television screen. Red. Green. Blue. The signal buzzed and bit like a hungry mosquito dipping into his ear canal; a cacaphonic range of squeals, giggles, sharp laughter, like a joke had been told but he couldn't understand it, and he suspected it was about him, _ they were laughing at him_.

In time, he crawled and his hands and knees towards it, and the screen ballooned before him until it encompassed his entire field of view, dancing with advertisements, music stings, the cartoon bubbles, and someone watching him, _ looking at him_.

Breathing. Was it his breathing? He felt his knees fail, and his exhales fogged the brilliant light. His vision rolled up to the ceiling.

An eye. Something _ like _ an eye, open and agape, so huge that it threatened to swallow the room, no, the house in its erupted maw. It was a swirling, galaxy-churning red, thick as tar, burning with light and hate. It bore down on him worse than ten Earth suns; it rumbled with insatiable hunger.

Zim shrieked and fumbled backwards, knocking into a bookshelf, his body numb with fear.

And then, the eye was gone. Just the peaceful, familiar rat's nest of cables and wires. GIR hummed a feverous ditty in the kitchen as he frosted his remaining cupcakes.

Identify, it said.

Submit, it said.

He didn't see the eye anymore, but its voice thrummed in his PAK steadily, relentlessly, like a sonar ping; like hostile whispering from a mouth pressed against the seams of a locked door, while the doorknob rattled.

...Identify.

….Submit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What?
> 
> You thought this was going to be a comedy, did you?


	4. The Executable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zim's in a bad way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all! Sorry for the delay!

...So.

...It had come to this.

Dib had both hands planted on either side of his cereal bowl. He chewed his lower lip, steeled his gaze, and readied himself. He wouldn't give in. He wouldn't let this defeat him…!

The freakish, white face stared back at him, its black eyes devoid of compassion or mercy. A grotesque smile of teeth flashed, and spittle flew when it sputtered a hiss.

"No. Bad! Bad possum!"

The ash-colored fuzzball waddled over the tabletop, its haunches knocking past the milk jug as it approached.

"No… No!"

It was too late; the animal lunged at him. Dib, defeated, yelped and recoiled, which allowed the opossum to dunk its snout into his bowl to slurp and munch.

With a groan, Dib directed his ire at the truly guilty party. "Gaz! Does it _ really _ have to be on the table!?"

Gaz opened a single, hateful eye. She glowered at him over her own bowl of Choco-Coca-O's. "You want Ghoulie to eat on the _ floor_? Like some filthy animal?"

Before Dib could point out that it was, indeed, a _ filthy animal, _their father strode into the kitchen to insert himself into the dispute.

"Your sister's right, son! This lovely specimen is part of the family now!" Said new family member belched, flecks of milk spewing from its jaws and over the tabletop. Disquieted by the opossum's manners, Membrane tapped a gloved finger to his concealed chin. "Erm… What _ breed _did you say she was?"

As Ghoulie got to work gnawing the cereal box into tatters, Gaz answered cooly, "I dunno. Labradoodle?"

Dib, deciding he wasn't all that hungry after all, slid down from his seat. The late morning began its slow simmer outside, foreshadowing another warm, calm summer day. But since the events of last night, he couldn't keep his mind quiet. He tossed and turned much of the night; no matter how many mind-clearing mantras he repeated to himself, he couldn't let go of the abundant, ominous questions left unanswered when he slinked away from Zim's home.

He had to go see. He couldn't wait any longer.

"Where are _ you _ going?" Gaz asked, as if it was any of her business.

"Out."

"You mean Zim's."

Dib's hackles raised. Where did she get off on noticing that?

"Weren't you over there _ just _last night?" Gaz cast a skeptical eye on him. "Why are you getting so chummy with him, anyway?"

"We're not 'chummy'! He's…" Dib tried to think of an appropriate lie: one that would cover suspicions and be close enough to the truth that he wouldn't be easily called out. "He's got a condition, which I'm... studying."

"A condition other than chronic stupidity?"

But the professor cooed with sympathy, seemingly not hearing his daughter's sass. He settled into a chair with a steaming mug of coffee, oblivious, too, to the wreckage being wrought by their new pet. "Oh, your friend is sick? I'm sorry to hear that, son. Just say the word, and I can have Foodio 3000 whip up a mean batch of chicken noodle soup for him."

"No, he's _ fine_. He's… getting better, I don't know; it doesn't matter!" Dib hurried for the door, desperate to escape his willfully-misunderstanding kin. "I'll be back later, ok!"

He heard his father cry out before he slammed the door behind him: "Have fun!"

* * *

He was glad to set out before noon, because he wasn't willing to discard his coat, and the day hadn't warmed up quite yet. There was a sweet stillness in the air that day, almost sickly in its aroma, like sour marmalade. He passed the overripe fruit trees of his neighbors at the end of the block, picked up a bruised tangerine, and chucked it down the road. He felt a pang of empathy for it: this rotten thing, rolling clumsily for an unknown destination.

It landed in the gutter. He sighed and kept walking.

It didn't take long to reach Zim's house, but when he came within viewing distance, his steps slowed. Dib knew the house so well that he could tell from a distance that something was… amiss. He couldn't put his finger on it straight away. The windows seemed too dark and impenetrable; normally the lights wouldn't be on during the day and this would be no sign of trouble, but from across the block, they appeared opaque. _ Shuttered_. Where the house normally had an unsettling vibe to it, like a fever dream that you couldn't quite shake, now it looked eerie and lurking. It sagged with some unseen weight.

When he reached the sidewalk before the fence, he noticed the most glaring omission: the gnomes were gone. It actually took him a few moments to realize this; seeing the yard empty ached his head with its incongruity, even disconcerted him. A smile without teeth, he thought. He crept onto the path, thinking that his steps might reawaken and summon the gnome army from hidden, underground compartments. But… Nothing. He reached the stoop without incident.

Up close, he saw that the front windows had curtains drawn tightly, preventing any light from entering. He drummed up some courage and knocked on the door.

He heard nothing― not even the scurry of someone avoiding detection.

With a huff of frustration, he hammered his fist on it again.

"Open up, Zim!"

He'd tried the mannerly way; he grabbed at the doorknob to give it a twist and push. With a rattle, he found it firmly locked.

"Hey! I'm not letting you renege on your promise! You owe me!"

Still silent. He craned his neck to take it in the view of the home's green, disjointed facade.

Dib did not let himself feel defeated. He'd broken into Zim's base more times than he could count―he could do it again. But he would need his wits. He would need a plan. He would need to exploit the number one gap in Zim's security system.

He banged his fist on the door again and hallooed, "It's… It's a delivery! Of… tacos! Uh-huh! It's me, Taco-Delivery Man!"

With the irresistible bait in place, he needed only to wait. A few moments went by, and from deep inside the hollows of the house, a tiny plinking of metal drew near. The door didn't open right away, though; the thing hesitated, like it sensed a trap, or it had been strictly warned against letting anyone inside.

But the door clicked and heaved, its weight much greater than usual, and it groaned on its hinges as its maw revealed a pitch black interior. Dib squinted and angled his view inside.

From a distance, a single eye… Glowing in the dark… Watching him…

It approached and leaped out at him.

"GAH!"

"HELLO~!" GIR forced himself into the doorway, with one eye socket empty and the other eye scanning the boy. "WHERE DA TACOS AT?"

"Wha…?" Dib recovered his breath. It took a second to take in the sight of the disfigured little robot. "What happened to your eye?"

The question made the innocent robot cock its head and promptly forget its stomach. "I'm lookin' for it! Can you help?"

"I… I'm not sure I…"

If it had lashes, it would be batting them now―albeit with one eye. "Pretty pwe-e-ease?!"

Dib frowned. Of course he needed a way in, but the robot's state had given him some pause. No way did its owner tolerate equipment being left in such a faulty state. "Okay, sure. But then I have to talk to Zim."

"Mmmmmmmm-OKAY-DEAL!"

The door reared back on its hinges, hit some hidden clutter, and stopped a bit shy of half-open. Dib saw and then could only hear the patter of GIR's tiny metal feet scurrying back into the house, so he squeezed and sidled his way in. He groped in the dark, trying to find a lightswitch. Did the room even have one? Regardless, the room was in pitch blackness.

"Hey―hey! Robot! Can you hit the lights? I can't see a―"

A beam of white-hot light ignited his face. He yelped in pain and shielded his eyes.

"LIKE DIS?"

With some struggling to step forward, Dib realized the beam came from the robot's eye. Evidently, the SIR unit had an oft-forgotten flashlight feature. "Not at my face!"

"Look what I can do!" GIR cycled mindlessly through its settings: a headache-inducing strobe mode, a slow flickering mode, a red light, a green light, and ultraviolet (which, unfortunately, revealed some varied and cryptic stains about the room). It settled on a red-and-green blinker setting, and chirped, "Ehehehe! I'm a Christmas tree!"

Trying not to sound exasperated, Dib continued to shuffle uneasily through the dark space. His foot immediately tangled and almost tripped him. "That's… That's great. Can you light the room for me?"

The strobing light charged forward; suddenly, GIR was in front of him again. "Aww, you afraid of the dark?" It seized his right hand in its metal pincer. "It's okay, you can hold my hand."

"Ugh! No, I just―" Dib could not successfully excise his hand from it―the robot's grip was much stronger than it looked―so he gave up arguing and simply twisted its head around with his other hand. "Light, _ please_."

At last, GIR cooperated. Its one eye illuminated the room, and Dib, by tilting the robot's head to and fro, could control the direction of the light.

Dib was shocked by what he saw.

It looked like a bomb had gone off.

No. It looked like a whole _ bunch _of bombs had gone off, each holding malicious and specific intent against each aspect of the room. The television was but a hollow frame with its guts spilling into the floor; the floorboards had been ripped asunder, leaving it a mess of cumbersome cables and metal frames; the walls had been stripped; the couch was a skeleton of fabric clinging to wooden bones. A thick wall of dangling, dead cables hung limp from the ceiling, their tips marred where they had been gashed or ripped, and they strung before him like an impenetrable mess of jungle vines. Even trying to step into the living room felt impossible at first. But after climbing over a few stacks of debris, being careful not to slip and fumble into who-knows-what, Dib managed to crawl through the cables and come out into the kitchen, which was somehow even in worse shape. The fridge lay on its side, murdered, it stomach ajar. The oven vomited forth trays and mangled wireframes. And once again, the walls and floors had been left bare and shredded like paper.

An adult with experience in such things might look upon the totality of circumstances and conclude that Zim was very much _ on something_. Dib, though, knew this was almost certainly a side effect of whatever had gone wrong last night.

"Zim? Hello-o-o?"

"We lookin' for my eye yet?" GIR whined, uncharacteristically insistent.

"Oh, right. Uh. Where'd you leave it last?"

A tongue dangled from its mouth, and a shrug accompanied its answer: "I dunno."

Dib grit his teeth. He didn't want this to carry on much longer. "Well, let's retrace your steps. Where were you last?"

"Ummm…" The robot's single eye blinked. "I 'member… I was in a pile… And then I was in another pile… And THE-E-EN… I was playin' hide and seek in the 'frigerator!"

"And that's when you lost your eye?"

"Naah, that happened when Master took me apart!"

"Er." Dib, taken aback, asked, "Why did he do that?"

"To stop the voice in his head!"

...That didn't sound good.

"It hurt!" GIR giggled with disconcerting carelessness and continued in a sing-song tone, "I be-e-egged him to stop!"

"Oh… kay… That's… Horrifying." Dib started digging through a pile of debris and picked up a remote control that had been torn into dangling pieces of wires and circuitry. He tossed it aside and left looking. "Is that what he did to this other stuff? He took it all apart? What was he _ doing_?"

"He's goin' on vacation!"

Dib didn't have time to interrogate the robot in return for mere non-sequitur answers. He pushed one pile away, dug through another, and after a few minutes, he moved toward a stack of the faux-fun-dip canisters that he'd seen Zim suckle on before. He toppled them, and near the very bottom of the mess, his hand clasped a smooth cylinder the size of a soda can.

"I-I think I found it!"

The robot jaunted over to him in frolicking skips; he tried to hand it over, but it stared dumbly and expectantly at him.

"Oh, you want me to…? Uh… alright…" Hand shaking, he pressed the screw-bit into the robot's empty eye socket and twisted. GIR giggled and squirmed at first, like it tickled, so Dib had to clutch its metallic head still. "Here you go, little buddy." Steadily, with a few turns, the eye fastened into place. He made sure to tighten it completely and then, when he noticed no light coming out of it, he gave it a tap with his finger. A flicker, then bright, neon light appeared, casting a pale faint light over Dib's body.

"Ooh!" The robot cooed. "You're in 3D!"

"Alright, where's Zim?"

"Master's downstairs! C'mon! Let's go play!"

It was then that Dib realized the danger he was in, because once again, the robot had him by the hand, inescapably, and was yanking him in the direction of the smashed trash can that disguised an elevator chute. With the place in such disarray, a panicked thought occurred to him. "Is the elevator even working?"

"A-a-a-and, JUMP!"

"Wa-wa-WAIT A SECOND WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

* * *

It was best described as the 'World's Worst Super-Slide.'

The elevator chute, free of any platform, turned to a dark, tumbling passageway of plunging terror, as Dib screamed for nearly a full minute on his head-first trip down. Fortunately, the chute didn't have any twists or turns, so he didn't get much in the way of bruising, but his limbs brushed against the metal walls and burned, slipped, seared from blitz-like friction. Meanwhile, in the total darkness, the robot filled the echoing death-tube with maniacal cackling and dual strobe-lights, which made the experience all the more nightmarish.

The chute ended, and Dib catapulted out into the open air, careening to the bottom of an empty, dark chamber. He flailed, but realized GIR still had him by the hand, and in a moment of rare cognizance, the robot turned on its jet pack and ripped him along by the arm, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process.

In mid-air, they spiraled, spun, and made a hard landing on the metal floor. Dib met the ground with his knees, then flung onto his face.

"TA-DAAA!" 

GIR bowed to an audience of no one; Dib moaned and drew up onto his unsteady feet. He swallowed back some queasiness, peered around the chamber, and realized it was the same space he'd occupied the previous night. Except now, much like upstairs, the lights and power had been shut off. The electric hum that permeated the underground previously was now a stoic, icy silence. He shivered.

Up ahead, a few yards away in the utter blackness, a figure worked by the dim, red light of an emergency lamp. Zim, his back turned to them as if he'd heard nothing, had a panel from the wall exposed, and plucked at the revealed wires with his fingers. Breathy muttering filled the massive chamber.

"Zim…?" Dib fumbled forward. He glanced back to pull the robot along with him, to at least light his way, but GIR had wandered off to some distant corner and left him alone. The boy took slow, deliberate steps for the alien, and suddenly turned for the ceiling and half-heartedly called out, "Hey, uh, computer-guy? Can you turn on the lights?"

The absence of the hum was deafening. A drip of perspiration tumbled onto the floor and echoed down the corridor.

"Computer―"

"I turned off the computer," Zim cut in gruffly. His voice was frighteningly dry and exhausted. "I cut… the power… to everything… Can't risk it… Can't... risk…" Now lost in his words, he bent back over the panel and gave it another powerful yank and snap. Sparks illuminated the stern curves of his expression. "What are you doing here, human? This isn't a good time."

"Yeah, I… Could tell? Look, I don't want to get in the way of… whatever you're doing. I just wanted that data disk―"

"I lied to you," Zim interrupted. He sounded neither proud nor guilty about this, but irritated that he had to pause his work to explain it. "The data disk is a fake."

Dib awkwardly adjusted his glasses and took it this sudden honesty. "Oh." 

"Now, is that all?" Zim asked impatiently.

That _ was _ all. Wasn't it? Dib nervously tapped two fingers together. "...I guess…" He glanced around. All about them was quiet, dark, and hollow like a void. "So… Is your PAK working okay now? And your ID…?"

Zim offered him a brief, withering glare. "That doesn't matter anymore."

"Sorry, is something going on?"

Zim let out a dry, coarse grunt of a laugh, but dropped his gaze. He sarcastically replied, "Oh, no, everything's fine, Dib-monkey."

"Really?" Dib rose his voice in anger. "Because it looks to me like you've _ completely destroyed _ your base. What the heck, man! This is starting to freak me out! What did you mean by 'you can't risk it'? Risk _ what_?"

The tiny footsteps of Zim's robot interrupted. GIR dragged behind him a comically-large suitcase. "Master," it squeaked, "can I bring my snorkel?"

Zim groaned. "For the LAST TIME, GIR! Bring whatever you want, because we AREN'T COMING BACK!" Before Dib could open his mouth to ask, the alien spun around, a glinting screwdriver clutched in his hand with murderous intent. Dib backed away in surprise, and Zim hissed, "If I thought for a _ second _ that you were responsible for this, I'd gut you where you stand! But not to worry, weenie-brain. You and your garbage-pit of a planet aren't my concern anymore."

"Wh-what? You're―"

"_Leaving_." Zim stabbed the screwdriver into the panel frame and wrenched the metal scrap onto the floor with a frightening clatter. "I need to get as far from here as possible. Maybe I'll find a nice cave to live in, the next galaxy over."

"Yaaaaay!" Gir clapped with glee and threw open his suitcase. "We're goin' campin'!"

"I don't… I don't understand."

Zim sighed, leaned his head briefly against the wall, and dropped the screwdriver to the floor. "My PAK accessed confidential files from the central Irken server. _ Very _ confidential files. I don't know how, and I don't know _ why_, but it did. And protocol is clear: any Irken that accesses confidential materials must submit themselves for immediate deletion. Understand now?"

"Confidential files?" Dib, flabbergasted, felt his stomach twist with strange excitement. "Like… like what?"

"I don't know; I don't care! But the moment Irk realizes I accessed them, I'm done for!"

"B-but it wasn't even your fault!" Dib could hardly keep up with his own thinking now, his words moved so fast; his natural, human-born advocacy for fairness got the better of him. "Don't you have a right to a trial or something? Maybe you can explain it to them."

Zim arched an eye at him, like he was an idiot. "Explaining! What do you think this is?! It's out of my hands now. There's only one choice, if I want to live: shut my base down and go off-grid, for good!" He grumbled bitterly, "One advantage, at least… I know no one will bother searching for me… Since those… Those two… _ IMBECILE cretins _ sent me out on this _ hopeless fool's errand_!"

Dib stepped back in shock. He'd never heard Zim express anything except worshipful, bootlicking reverence towards his leaders.

Zim, in turn, realized what he said. He shuddered, quaked, and erupted into a mournful scream. "I DIDN'T MEAN WHAT I SAID! MY TALLEST ARE THE WISEST, MOST HANDSOME, MOST TRUSTWORTHY―" He screwed his eyes shut, pulled down his antennae, and wailed. "NONONONO! STOP!" After a few moments of heaving and self-flagellation, Zim flicked his eyes open weakly. "I don't know how, but―whatever I accessed must have scrambled my processors. I can't stop thinking and saying these h-horrible―" It was like a wire crossed and snapped; he spasmed and screeched uncontrollably. "_I would make a better leader than those two nimrods! _―AUGHKHH!"

Dib looked on in surprise, then realization. He clenched his teeth. The code… It was rolling back. These were Zim's real thoughts, seeping out and exchanging fisticuffs with old brainwashing.

But for the moment, Dib was too caught off guard by the other news. He felt, to his chagrin, a heavy regret at the thought of Zim leaving so suddenly and unceremoniously. It wasn't what he intended to happen. It wasn't what he really _ wanted_. After all, what were the chances of another paranormal being landing on his planet like this? And moving into his neighborhood? Into _ his class_? Zim's crash-arrival into his life had been a monstrous nightmare, but in another way, a fulfillment of his every childhood fantasy. An alien! Proof and confirmation of his wildest theories! And if Zim left now, Dib would never have a chance to redeem himself. His father would forever regard him as his poor, insane son; his classmates would wonder aloud whatever became of that green exchange student, and never acknowledge the truth. He would never, ever be validated.

And… he'd never see what comes of this disable-code business. That would be a loss, too.

Dib knew he should let it go. But if letting go meant losing _ everything _?

He panicked.

"Wait a second!" He marched forward and slapped a hand onto the panel. "That's it!? You're just going to give up and run?"

Zim, offended and bleary-eyed, shoved his palms into Dib's chest, knocking him a step back. "Don't preach at me, worm! Your puny brain can't even COMPREHEND the danger I'm in!"

"Zim, I―!" (He couldn't believe he was saying this). "I can help!"

"Help? HELP!?" Zim shrieked at him. Despite his rage, he looked suddenly quite vulnerable and limp; he had to steady himself with a hand on the wall as he cursed. "I think you've done ENOUGH at this point, don't you!?"

Dib pointed a finger in his face. "You're on the run! And we're not enemies anymore. That makes _ me _the closest thing you have to an ally."

"Nonsense!" Zim balked. "I have GIR! And Minimoose! And the Compu―oh, wait, no, don't have him anymore, BUT I STILL HAVE THOSE TWO!"

Dib glanced over his shoulder. Currently, GIR and Minimoose were coordinating efforts to stuff a briefcase full of snack foods. He shook his head. "If you accessed secret files, then maybe you know some dirty secrets! Like maybe you know a big Irken weakness or something!"

Zim split his lips to reveal a horrible sneer, perhaps readying himself to rebuke the boy for even suggesting it. But the edge of his mouth shivered and he stopped. He seemed almost… to be listening.

"It means you have leverage! You _ have something _ on them now!" Dib, encouraged by Zim's grim silence, continued eagerly, "You're right, you know. Your leaders _ are _jerks! You should get something over on them!"

Zim gawked and sputtered. "You―you dare suggest I wield confidential information and threaten my own race with it, for my own benefit?"

"...Yes?"

A long moment passed. The rage in Zim's brow slowly eased, though it was replaced with a mild look of perplexion, like he had just awoken from a dream. "Hmm," he mulled aloud. "Er… Mmm… It might work."

"Really?"

Zim recoiled and growled at Dib's fervency. "I said 'might'! I don't even know why I'm…" The Irken trailed off that thought. "I don't know what files I accessed, or what they contained. Who knows if they'll be useful."

"Last night, you were hallucinating like crazy. What did you see?"

As Zim looked up at the boy, a flicker of angry red flashed before him. He twitched in fear, but didn't know why. "I don't remember."

"Should I get my laptop? We could―"

"No! No." Zim shook his head furiously; he didn't want a repeat experience. "I have a superior Irken memory: I'm sure if I try, it'll come back to me." He then aimed a fist at his own noggin, and clubbed his brow. He repeated this self-abuse a few times, howling: "REMEMBER, YOU USELESS FLESH-BRAIN! REMEMBER WHAT ZIM WANTS!"

"Uh, Zim…"

Zim groaned, huffed, strained, grit his teeth until his bloodshot eyes about popped out of his skull. Veins bulged from under his pale green skin; sweat gathered on his brow.

"ZIM! Stop!" Dib intervened by grabbing him by the shoulders. "You're gonna burst something! If you stay calm and try to focus, it'll… work better."

Zim, strangely receptive to coaching for the moment, agreed, "Calm, and focus. Yes." Just when Dib thought he was going to implement the advice, ZIm started chanting and throwing his fists: "CALM! FOCUS! CALM! FOCUS!"

"Oh-kay. You know what? Lemme just…" Dib, after sliding a hand down his face in dismay, circled around him and pushed him into seated position on the floor. "I think I have to show you." The boy walked back and took a seat on the floor right across from him. "Fold your legs, like this."

Zim eyed him skeptically, but copied his pose.

"Keep your back straight, shoulders loose, and head balanced. Okay? Now, we're gonna breathe. Deep and slow."

Zim, too unfamiliar with human customs to complain at being essentially initiated into a yoga session, still whined, "What is this? It feels stupid."

"Just _ TRY _it! Follow my lead."

To Zim's credit, he tried. He followed Dib's breathing exercise, closed his eyes, attempted the whole 'clear your mind' tactic. But Irkens were designed to think a mile a minute, and Zim's defective settings only exaggerated this. Within only a minute or two, Zim babbled: "Nothing's happening. I've cleared my mind, and now it's boring. Boring, boring, boring. Ugh. Is this over yet? Can I open my eyes? Dib? Are you listening to me? How long does this take? Huh? Huh?"

A strangled, exasperated sound escaped Dib's throat. He slammed a palm over Zim's mouth and wheezed. "Stop. _ Talking_!"

Zim squirmed with impatience.

"Fifty breaths," Dib said, like a priest assigning penance. He realized that only a literal answer would satisfy the Irken's appetite for challenge; Zim, it seemed, needed exact and rigorous orders to keep himself from fidgeting. "Slow ones. And if you talk, we start over."

At the very least, this convinced Zim to shut up.

* * *

Zim didn't think it would work.

But somewhere in the soupy mess of his consciousness, the air cycling through his spooch drained and dispersed the stray atoms of his thoughts, like cobwebs breaking apart under a faint breeze. He felt dizzy. His limbs tingled with strange numbness until he seemed to float weightless in the din. Then, somewhere in the shadows, an old memory crept up on him, resting its weary head on his shoulders―no, it wasn't his memory, was it? It felt, all at once, like an old friend and an intruding stranger; he both wished to push it away and draw it near. In the end, its ruddy heat smoothed over him, and showed him: 

_He was on _▓▒▓▒▓_, close to home. He was standing in the shallow end of the creek, and saw a smooth-skinned, silver eel dart between stones. He watched carefully. He didn't much like meat, but _▆█▞▟▞_ was always pleased when he brought eel home with him; _▆█▞▟▞_ would grill them up and eat the flesh with some vegetable or grain._

_And he wanted to get home soon. After all, _▆█▞▟▞_ hadn't been feeling well lately. And it only seemed to get worse when…_

…

He lost his grasp on that one. It floated away, a white cloud passing.

Then the memory changed. He was somewhere else, now. Some other time. He recognized it, didn't recognize it... 

_His entire body vibrated from the force of movement outside; he lifted his head and looked out into the colony._

_A shadow grew over the sky, smothering the sun in black clouds. Thunder. She had come. Her eye pierced them with red hatred; in a blink, her hungry tendrils speared the surface, aiming through trees and stone and flesh._

_He wanted to cry out. He wanted to warn the others._

_But a tendril took him by the leg, snared his throat, plunged a needle through his chest. A booming, buzzing voice interrogated him as life drained away; it spun and dug, peeled away his skin, twisted off his head. Ripped his limbs away, callous and quick, like a child plucking butterfly wings. A blade at the tip of a tendril dissected him, slicing open his abdomen to explore his guts._

_The eye, burning, volcanic, starved, sucking him in like a gravitational pull:_

** _yyyYOU AGAIN_ **

** _i knnnOW YOU_ **

** _i-i-i-I sssee Y_ **

* * *

"Zim!"

A more real, visceral pain stung the side of Zim's face. He startled, shook, and blinked awake. He was on the floor, toppled over; his head hammered.

"Geez!" Dib, standing before him, wagged a hand to relieve the pain of slapping him. He looked at the alien's pallid face. "That got… intense really fast."

Feeling a wave of nausea and confusion, Zim pressed a hand to his forehead. "H-hah? What happened?"

"You started screaming. Something about your 'Mother'?"

The word hit him like a freight train. Zim's eyes widened with understanding and horror. His sickly color worsened; his legs unspooled.

"I thought Irkens didn't have parents."

"N-n-no." Zim started to claw at the rims of his eyes, his breaths staggered and pained. He fell forward, slamming his hands onto the floor. "No, no, no! This…! This isn't supposed to be POSSIBLE! How could this have HAPPENED!? It's for sure now: a horrible, painful, inescapable death for me!!"

"You're that scared of your mom?"

"Not MY mother, you rat-brain! THE Mother!"

Zim saw the lack of comprehension in Dib's face and realized his mistake. Of course the boy didn't know.

He stood to his feet and grumbled reluctantly. "This is… highly classified. Understand?! I shouldn't be telling you ANY OF THIS!"

Dib knew that Zim was rather careless with intelligence anyway, so the fact that the alien seemed extra-cautious meant he was going to hear something especially juicy. He tried not to sound ecstatic. "Okay, shoot."

"You know our leaders include the Almighty Tallest, as well as the Control Brains. BUT. Above even them, at the very, very top… There's…" He had to swallow to find the courage to say it again: "Mother."

"You have a queen?"

"More than that! She's The Mother Mind, The Source, The Dream-Haver… She is the _ creator _ of the Irken source code, the intelligence that rules the Empire!"

"Wait, so your race has some kind of super-powerful overlord?" After a moment's thought, Dib shrugged. "Actually, no, that follows. She's an 'intelligence'? Is she… alive?"

"No one knows," Zim answered weakly. He cowered behind the remnants of his chair, as if it could shield him from her espying gaze. "Some say she was once an Irken like us, and she outgrew the need for a physical body. Others say she's something… else. Whatever she is, she's… impossibly old."

"So, basically, you saw an Irken Elder-God." Dib couldn't help it; it just came out, along with a cheesy grin: "Woah. _ Cool_."

"And _ she _ saw _ me _," Zim whimpered. "Which means I'm DOOMED! I don't even know how it could have happened! Establishing a connection with her should be IMPOSSIBLE!"

"Yeah, that does seem weird," Dib agreed. One would think the ultimate god-being of a race would have sufficient security measures to prevent random access.

"Th-that's it. I can't stay! I can't DO this!" Zim scuttled across the floor in a panic, half-sobbing. He hurried toward GIR's suitcase and slammed it shut, ignoring the socks and foodstuffs overflowing out of it. "GIR! We're done packing!"

Dib hurried after him, catching up when the alien struggled to drag the weighted bag. "But, Zim!"

"It was a nice thought, human. But there's _ no way on IRK _ I'm dealing with her! It's suicide!"

"You're thinking about it the wrong way! This is GREAT!"

Zim, aghast, whirled his head around at him. He unleashed a loud, angry scoff. "If I wasn't so very doomed, I'd be laughing in the face of your _ pathetic _ ignorance!"

"Hear me out! This means it goes up to the very top!"

Zim paused, puzzled. "What does?"

"The CONSPIRACY!"

"Now I _ know _ you have brain worms," Zim uttered in disdain. "What conspiracy? What are you BABBLING about?"

Usually, _ usually_, Dib went with his instincts. He would feel something in his gut of guts, make his deductions, and fly into a rampage of certainty.

But if Nessie had taught him to let things go, his father had tried to instill in him a caution against jumping to conclusions.

"Alright, fine, I don't… _ Know _that there's a conspiracy. But it's weird, right? Someone had to have planted that file on you! And it just so happens to have super-secret Irken files on it? And, AND, it acted funny when I tried to delete it! Like someone--or something―doesn't want it gone! If we could just find out―"

Mopping sweat from his brow, Zim grumbled, "It can't be helped."

"Come on, Zim! Do you really want to die in some cave somewhere?"

Zim stomped and howled. "I've _ told _you, meat-head, there are no options! Even if I wanted to look into it, I can't! I can't connect to the Irken server! Not without giving away the situation and DOOMING me!"

"Okay. Where else could we do research?"

"To find sensitive information about the Irken Empire? Tch! FOOL! We don't allow ANY of our precious data to rest in the hands of our enemies! ALL―er… Except..." A flash of fearful doubt crossed Zim's face; he rested a shaky finger on his lower lip. "No… No, it couldn't possibly..."

"Except what?"

Zim scuttled backward, like he'd revealed something he shouldn't. "No, never mind. It's impossible, anyway."

Dib charged him, frantic with curiosity. "What? What is?"

Zim sighed. "The Universal Archive. But it's... not an option, so forget it."

The very words tingled in Dib's mouth: "_The Universal Archive_?"

"It's the most comprehensive library of civilized intergalactic history ever built. Which would be GREAT, except Irkens aren't permitted inside its halls." He squawked his indignance. "Can you BELIEVE it?!? Just because we tried to blow it up!" He paused. "A few times!" He paused again. "...This year!"

Dib could hardly hear Zim's whinging; he was too busy daydreaming and salivating. _ A library_. A library of _ everything_? It was more than Dib had ever dared to imagine. "I'm not Irken," he said aloud.

"Hah?"

"Zim, I'm not Irken. I could get in, right?"

"Y-you… URRRRGH!" Zim clasped a hand over his face, slumped to his knees, and pounded the floor like a man decrying his god. "WHY CAN'T YOU LEAVE ME TO DIE IN PEACE? CURSE YOU, YOU DIRTY APE! I COULD BE ROLLING IN CAVE MUD BY NOW!"

For a time, Zim seemed lost in frustration and grief; he never answered Dib's question, but wailed, and swore, and garbled words through frothy phlegm. This tantrum felt all the more terrifying in the vast, hollow space of the chamber, illuminated only by the red emergency lantern that had since been knocked over.

Dib didn't know what to do. He hadn't thought pushing this hard would cause a meltdown, and he didn't exactly have a way to leave without a running elevator. He shuffled his feet and pulled awkwardly on his collar.

It was Minimoose, drifting down the corridor, who interrupted. "Nyeh!"

Zim sniffled and scraped away angry tears. "Huh?"

"Nyeh."

"Look, I know! I've considered ALL THOSE THINGS, but―"

"Nyeh!"

"But if I do this, it could be the end of Zim! I could be marked a traitor, or worse! And then where would I be?"

"Nyeh!"

"I suppose you're right. We have a lot of time, if I'm careful. But letting the _ boy _in on this is a risk I can't…"

"Nyeh!"

"GEEZ, can I get a word in edgewise? You're opinionated today. Anyway, I… I see where you're coming from. But this trip will be too dangerous. I will have to bring GIR, of course, but it's best if you stay behind. Understand?"

"Nyeh..."

"Alright, alright. I will."

Zim plodded back over to Dib, his face full of exhaustion and defeat. 

The boy, confounded by the exchange, asked, "Uh, so, is that a yes?"

"Arguing with that moose is impossible," Zim groused. He assailed the heavens with clenched fists. "Fine! FINE! It's not as if I have anything to lose now! How quickly can you pack, Earth boy?"


	5. The Archive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zim and Dib go to a library, but will learning ensue?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MY APOLOGIES for the extra long wait. Life got in the way and then so did intense writer's laziness. Have an extra-long chapter as a compensation.

Dib didn't know what to pack for an impromptu trip into outer space, so he made his best guess. Two pairs of pants, enough shirts to last the week, and, like, a metric ton of underwear. You never knew, after all. His laptop was tucked under his shirts, along with every cable he could ever imagine needing. 

He also jammed in as much snack food as he could find in the kitchen cupboards; he didn't have any clue when next he'd get a proper meal, and he didn't intend to stick any Irken food into his mouth. The snack packs Zim favored could smell misleadingly edible, sweet like floral honey, but had an after-odor that left a rotten-meat musk in one's nostrils. During one of his invasions of Zim's home, Dib had opened a pack, taken a curious whiff, and almost vomited on the spot.

So, Dib packed candy. Lots of candy. Peanuts, chips, cookies, and… After feeling some shame at his poor dietary choices, he gathered some apples in his arms to carry up the stairs. It was in the foyer, though, that one tumbled from his grip and rolled across the floor, stopping at the toe of a familiar boot.

"Son?"

Already dreading the exchange, Dib lifted his gaze to the quizzical expression on his father's face.

"Something going on?"

"Oh! Uh…" Dib rushed to grab the apple from the floor. "It's… nothing."

"It's not some fruit-bat-vampire sort of nonsense, is it?"

"No! That… That didn't work out." The apples balanced back in his arms, but his stomach still turned. Was it excitement? Fear? Concern? But just as suddenly as he felt those things, he couldn't escape a thread of disappointment. He wanted no more than to rant and tell-all, to make known the adventure he was looking forward to. His father, though, would dismiss it as crazed rambling. Dib had so hoped his father would come around in the aftermath of the Florpus incident, but instead he had seemed all the more dedicated to denying reality. He sighed, and lifted his eyes to the concealed, begoggled gaze of one Professor Membrane. There was no way of getting around the fact that he might be gone for several days. "Um… Dad? Actually, there is something. I know I just got back, but… I'm going on a trip. It's a once-in-a-lifetime things, and I can't pass it up―"

His father, not flinching, raced to laud his choice. "How exciting for you! Yes, it's good for young people to travel! Where are you headed? Somewhere educational?"

"I'm going to space… uh, camp. Space Camp."

His father gasped. "Does that mean…? NASA lifted its restraining order?" The professor clapped his hands atop Dib's shoulders, voice brimming with pride. "That's wonderful news, son!"

Dib, astonished by his happiness, didn't contradict him.

"I knew that someday, you would be led back into the loving arms of REAL SCIENCE! Of course, I wish you showed more interest in the private sector..."

(Dib held his breath; he really didn't want to get cornered with another of his father's rants against the Fed's stranglehold on aeronautics).

"BUT, if shooting government satellites into orbit is what makes you happy, I won't argue."

"Thanks, Dad." Dib knew this was all he could hope for. "Anyway, I'm leaving, like, now. Is that okay?"

With disturbing nonchalance, his father shrugged, then turned to wistful longing. "Eager to get going, eh! Ah, the immeasurable zeal of youth!" He clomped toward the basement stairs. "Well, be sure you say goodbye to your sister! I'm sure she'll be heartbroken to see you off so suddenly!"

The weight of the apples in Dib's arms seemed, at that moment, to grow. Once his father disappeared downstairs, his eyes settled on the looming doorway into the living room, from which he could see foreboding flashes of electronic light. He dared not look inside, but, trembling, he complied insofar that he stood in the shadow of that den, swallowed, and began hoarsely, "Uh, so, Gaz, I―"

The furious sounds of button mashing punctuated her threats: "Dib, I swear, if you make me lose this boss battle with your STUPID mouth-words, I'll rip your arms off and beat you with them."

* * *

The rolling suitcase thunked its wheels at every slight imperfection on the sidewalk's surface, and at one point a dog chased him for a block, but Dib let none of this dissuade him. His steps flowed. His heart pounded. His glasses clouded with his exertion.

Dib had been to space before, of course, and had uncomfortable and dangerous adventures, too. So in one important sense, there was no novelty to fret about. But it would be different, he believed, with Zim as a traveling partner, not only because of their hostile standing, but because the Irken would lend his experience to the trip. Dib had only before groped blindly into the realms of space, depending on computers or incomplete information to guide him. This time, he might actually get _ answers _.

It was nearly lunchtime when he made the turn for Zim's block. His mind turned absently to the sandwich jammed in his coat pocket, as he wondered if the jelly had started to soak through the bread yet, when he reached viewing distance of Zim's house. He stopped short on the street.

"Uhh…"

He adjusted his glasses and blinked the lingering humidity from his eyes. No, he was seeing correctly. The neighbors to the right of Zim's house stood on their front lawn, mouths agape; a child gripping a basketball had stopped on the street to stare. Dib came to join them because inexplicably, Zim had parked his Voot Runner there on the grass, plain for all the world to see. And furthermore, Zim himself trotted out onto the lawn, tools strewn about, and with his human disguise notably unworn.

Dib bolted, pushed basketball boy out of the way without apology, and hurried breathlessly up the walkway. He nearly tripped over GIR in the process; the robot, similarly out in the open, sat watching an obnoxious cartoon from a tiny remote television.

"Zim!" He puffed, arrived before the annoyed invader, and wheezed as he gestured about. "What are you doing?? You're not―everybody can _ see _―"

But Zim, seeing his fear, blew a raspberry and flicked an antennae. "I know! And who cares! If all goes as planned, I'm never coming back!" He sneered toward the fence, over which the female half of the neighborly couple gawked at them. He bristled and shook his fist, howling nastily, "Hey, hey, HEY! Take a picture, Mrs. Henderson! It'll last longer!!"

"Alright! Alright!" Dib pried his suitcase up into his grip. "Let's just get out of here before a news crew shows up."

Zim sniffed, hissed, and snapped to attention. He gave Dib a closely-examining glare before barking, "You have everything you need for your HYOO-MAN faculties, right? I'm not turning around!"

"No, I've got―"

Without warning, Zim drew out a spray-can of indiscernible origin and blasted the boy in the face. A noxious odor clouded his senses; Dib gagged and wheezed as the aerosol stuck in his nose and throat. The stink began to settle and seep into his clothes with an uncomfortable greasy texture, which he tried in vain to dust away with his hands.

"Augh, ew!" Dib fell to his knees in a coughing fit. "What is this!? It smells like corn chips and... old feet!"

"Good," Zim grunted. "Now I won't have to endure your putrid human musk." While Dib was distracted by the odorous incident, Zim seized his bag and chucked it into the Voot's back seat. The alien grunted in his direction again, eyes burning and voice ribbed with tension. "Listen closely, human. The Voot isn't built for group transport. It's going to be a tight fit, so if you annoy me in the slightest, know that I'll jettison you into the dead of space without hesitation!"

"Fine, whatever." Dib was too anxious to get going to care about these threats, so he turned his attention to the Voot, which looked to be in some state of disrepair. The hinges of the engine appeared uneven, and the rocket thrusters seemed a little crooked. "You're sure your ship's… safe?"

"Of COURSE it's safe! It's a product of masterful Irken engineering!" Zim gave the hull a brazen thud with his fist; the ship rattled worrisomely, and Zim hurried to push a plate back into position. "I-I had to disassemble it to remove the positioning system, but I put it back together! I know what I'm doing!"

Dib's steps faltered nervously as he approached it. "Don't you _ need _ that, though? To know where you're going?"

"NON-sense! Zim is a MASTER of navigation!" In a hasty, secretive motion, he pulled GIR to his side. He hissed: "GIR! You printed out those directions, didn't you?"

With a strained hiccup, victory hum, and salute, GIR slid his mouth open to allow a stack of paper to file out.

Zim snatched them, careful to stay out of sight, and continued to blather, "Anyway, it needed to be done. Without it, we can't be traced."

"You think someone's tracing us?"

Caught, Zim stammered, "W-well who knows!? Anything could happen! ANYWAYS! If you're finished making UNFOUNDED and IGNORANT statements, we need to leave. Bid farewell to your pitiful homeworld. You may not see it for a while."

Dib found this suggestion strangely personable. He looked over his shoulder. The neighborhood homes sagged along the sun-beaten street, their ambivalent shadows gazing down on him. The sky remained an imperfect blue, blotted by smog. Then he settled his eyes on basketball boy, who had begun digging around in his nostril, not breaking eye contact. Dib shuddered and turned back.

"Umm… Nah, I'm good. Let's go."

Zim hadn't lied; when seated alongside his luggage in the back, Dib had little space. But he could nestle his back on an engine compartment that hummed with warmth, and his knees braced against the backside of Zim's pilot seat. Furthermore, he still had a clear view out through the glass.

The Irken cursed in its native tongue, kicked a loose panel back into place, tossed GIR into the cabin with a clang, and clawed his way into his ship. His PAK clicked and whirred as he settled into his seat, and in preparing for lift-off, Zim fished his connector cable into the center console.

The Voot's internal computer announced: "_ Connecting: Invader Buttface _."

"Hah?"

They both gaped. Then, realizing what had happened, Zim turned to snarl at the culprit.

Dib, caught red-handed, laughed nervously and lifted his palms in surrender. A meek smirk overcame his lips in spite of himself. "I... I just had to. Right? C'mon, Zim, I _ had _ to―"

* * *

It was worth it. The top of Dib's ample head still ached, and he felt a small lump growing there, but it was still worth it.

Besides, the thrusters engaged moments later. They were on their way.

Dib was still surprised by how peaceful and fluid takeoff could be in Irken ships. He felt hardly any force, and the vessel seemed to break through the sky as if it were made of soft pudding. They glided, and the sickly blue atmosphere peeled away like a rind. In its place, the face of a billion stars burned into view, and soon the two of them glided over the free fabric of space.

With no rearview glass, Dib could not even as much as bid the swirling blue form of Earth goodbye. He could only imagine its shape and all of its countless lifeforms shrinking to the size of a marble before vanishing out of sight.

Zim, uninspired by any of this, continued to mutter under his breath. His sharp mood turned on his robot.

"GIR! Read me those coordinates!"

GIR released a squeal of unrestrained excitement, planted itself in a hand-stand atop the controls, and rattled off a series of numbers, each meaningless to Dib. Zim, though, grunted his understanding, swept the robot aside into a crashing heap on the floor of the cruiser, and yanked on his steering mechanism. The jolting move tossed the three of them; Dib, slamming a knee against the backframe of Zim's seat, regretted not asking about a seatbelt.

To the human's surprise, though, they didn't cruise for long before Zim jerked the ship to a standstill. "All right. Is this about it?"

Dib looked questioningly out the window. There was nothing but dead, empty space ahead of them.

But GIR hummed, squinting with profound focus at a crumpled sheet of paper: "Mmmmm, a little to the left!"

"Oh, a bit left?"

"Right."

"Ah, to the right."

"No, Master, go left."

"Left? But you said―"

"That's right, LEFT!"

"THAT'S WHAT I SAID TO BEGIN WITH, GIR!"

Already fighting a headache, and now getting nauseous with the negligent see-sawing of the ship's position, Dib snagged the printout from GIR's metal clutches. "Let me handle directions," he said with authority. But if he thought interpreting the information would be simple, a glance-over of the equations dissolved his confidence. Furthermore, a prominent drawing of a purple unicorn in fat crayon strokes obscured the bottom half of the page. "Oh, boy."

"For Irk's sake, would you― GIVE THAT TO ME! GIR, WHAT DID YOU DO!"

"I MADE IT PRETTY!"

Gurgling with the unpleasant sounds of alien frustration, Zim wrestled the sheet into his claws, flattened its creased, ruined form on the dashboard, and squinted for clues. "Eh… Well! It looks like we're in the right position."

Dib, astonished by this announcement, peered ever harder through the glass window. Nothing but blackness dotted with stars. "Uh… We're here already?"

"What! No! Of course not." Zim sank into his seat and, with a foot shoved against the control stick, fastened straps across his chest and lap. "These aren't directions to the Archive; they're coordinates to the nearest clear shot."

"Clear shot?"

"You sad, poorly-educated monkey." Zim fiddled with some calibration equipment before surrendering to Dib's curiosity. "Normally, it would take several months of space travel to go this distance. But I'm sure you can agree that would be unbearable. We're pulling a Manual Irken Jump."

"Oh, like hyperdrive."

"Don't SULLY our magnificent tech with your CRASS tee-vee terminology!" Zim shook his head in disdain. "We want a straight line without any large obstacles in the way. If anything wanders into our path, things could get interesting."

"What?" Dib paled with dread. "You mean we'll _ crash _?"

"Crash? Don't be silly! We'll be going so fast, our molecules will fly through anything we touch! However, it's possible for things to get… erm…" He petered off. "BUT that doesn't usually happen."

"That sounds... dangerous."

"Oh, it is! Incredibly! Now, sit down." Zim pulled his seat forward and leaned over a large, blinking button. He pointed. "When this button glows red, it means go! When it's NOT red, it means we might die! Ready?"

Dib opened his mouth, and Zim disregarded him.

"Okay!… Heeree we go… Aand… Now. Nope. Missed it. Aaaand. NOW―no, wait, I didn't like that one. Didn't feel right. Okay. There's one. There we go. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Yup, just getting the rhythm of it. There. There. Aaand there. I'll hit the next one. Ready? Aaand―"

Just when Dib was about to rip his ears off in frustration and agony, Zim slammed the button with his fist.

"Wait, Zim, should I have a seatbelt fooOOOOOORRR―"

* * *

Zim had told him truthfully that the trip would be fast―nearly instantaneous, in fact―but perhaps because the Irken had experienced the jumps so many times, he failed to convey the brutality in its swiftness. Not only was Dib thrown like a sack of jelly against the far end of the cabin, and flattened by a force of gravity until his innards felt liquified, but as the ship snapped into the appropriate speed, everything swam. Colors he did not have a name for flashed in his vision; the stars outside stretched into iridescent threads and then flooded the cabin with exploding light; the bonds between his atoms quaked and then disintegrated, each molecule torn from his body like barbs of iron. Within seconds, his body transformed into a sticky, unfocused blob being fired by cannon, and he had so little coalescence, he couldn't even scream.

But as soon as it started, it ended. A cacophonous whine of the engine released an exhausted sigh, the threads of light unspooled back into specks in space, and his atoms, hobbling and disoriented, wandered and stitched back into place. He could hardly believe he was alive. Dib collapsed onto the floor of the cabin, then used his quaking hands to paw at his chest. Soaked through with sweat, yes. But he wasn't inside out, and he was pretty sure his organs had all settled in the right place, too. He moaned and reached out for the pilot seat's frame, which proved a firm foundation to peel himself from the cold metal floor.

Zim, hearing his dramatic grunts of pain, showed no sympathy. Indeed, he didn't even bother looking over his shoulder. "If you hurl in here, I will BLAST you into orbit, puke and all!"

Now that Zim mentioned it, Dib did feel some queasiness. However, he successfully swallowed it down, and once his eyes refocused and looked past the control console, his attention and breath were stolen away.

Understanding scale through the glass view of the ship was truly impossible, but Dib could feel in his gut that the structure he witnessed was of impossible size. It was a giant, no, enormous, _ titanic _building made of something glistening and silver. Or at least, he could only suppose it was a building. Its shape circled like a grand cornucopia, funnel-like, with a long and narrow stem that dipped its root into a dimly-lit planet, and a great, yawning mouth stretching out into the void of space. The moon-silver structure dwarfed the planet it hovered above, casting a black shadow over its near face. A billion clusters of artificial lights were visible and twinkling over the surface of the world.

They must still have been far away from the building, because despite its massive proportions, Dib couldn't get a detailed view without wrestling past the command chair and pressing his eyes against the glass. His excitable breaths fogged his view.

"Wo-o-oah."

He could just barely make out the distant, teeming clouds of spaceships spiralling about the building's bottom stem. They looked like busy, hungry gnats, and must have been numbered in the thousands.

Sounding nervous as well as irritated, Zim suddenly yapped, "Would you MOVE!? I can't see where I'm going!" He began to press a booted foot at the boy's back and shoulder blade, but even this amount of physical force could not dissuade Dib's curiosity.

"THAT'S the Archive? It's huge! What's that planet down there?"

Rather than respond straight away, Zim grumbled and hissed, claw pounding against a red warning flashing on his control panel. "The camouflage circuit is out. Like I don't have enough problems already!" The alien seized and yanked hard on the control stick, thus sending the runner into a jerky, sudden catapulting motion forward. The mammoth funnel-shaped structure ballooned into real view, until it loomed overhead as expansive as sky. Nearing ships of varied kinds zipped to and fro without any visible organization, though Zim didn't seem concerned about them. He fiddled with his navigation system and turned to face the human and spew hot-tempered flecks of spit. "Listen, Dib-stink. This planet is run by enemies of the Irken Empire. We absolutely CANNOT be caught. We'll have to be SUBTLE! We'll have to NOT DRAW ATTENTION TO OURSELVES!! We'll have to―!"

Dib pointed nonchalantly. "Ship."

"Huh?"

Zim looked too late.

CLUNK.

The force of the runner colliding with a much larger ship threw the two of them forward, smashing their bodies into each other and their faces into separate apparati within the cabin; their vessel shuddered and groaned from the impact, but didn't buckle with any debilitating damage aside from cosmetic cracks in the glass.

As the cabin wobbled from the aftershock, the two groaned and unsuccessfully tried to unstick themselves. Zim had been knocked out of the pilot's chair and slipped into the leg-space underneath, essentially pinned, and Dib wriggled helplessly in a suspended position over the pilot's chair, his arms draped over the control panel but one foot jammed in the arm of said chair.

"You IDIOT!" Zim moaned, clawing the floor.

"Wh-what! You're the one who wasn't looking where you were going!"

"You! You were DISTRACTING me! Now PLEASE tell me that wasn't a―"

A red flash came over the comm screen, along with a blaring, forewarning sound.

"KKKKKCK. Of course! Of course we hit a defense cruiser. Okay. Okay. Nobody move! Dib-monkey? Whatever you do, do NOT answer that―"

"YAAAAY BUMPER CARS!" GIR sprang up as if from nowhere and landed on the control panel. "LET'S DO THAT AGAIN~!"

Before either of them could stop it, the robot drummed its feet about, planked on a few buttons, and forced Dib to lunge free in an attempt to tackle the troublemaker. Unfortunately, the boy's jump for the controls ended with his palm flat on the comm prompt. It dinged affirmatively, connected the call, and allowed a heavy, cranky voice to echo through the cabin.

"This is Chief Egra-du of the Elysium Defense Squad. Is this your vessel!?"

Dib, paralyzed, gazed up at the screen. A gruff-looking, tusked alien in a stiff uniform glared back at him. He quaked and tried to sit up properly, which proved difficult with an Irken crumpled underfoot. "Uhh, y-yes?"

"Well, watch where you're bleeding going! You're lucky there wasn't any damage, otherwise I'd―" The officer blinked a set of green, pupil-less eyes with a start, squinted at his own screen, and grumbled. "The heck…? What kinda.... Hey! Isn't this an Irken ship?"

Dib ignored the angry shuddering at his feet and let his lizard brain do the speaking for him. "Uhh… Yes?"

"But… You're not Irken," the chief pointed out. "I mean, not gonna complain, I'd blast you for sure if you were, but―why are you in an Irken ship?" 

Synapses snapped like dry twigs. Dib didn't even think. "It's stolen."

"Stolen?"

"Yes," Dib said, realizing too late that he was saying this to a space police officer. "I stole it. From an Irken."

In the resulting silence, Dib felt Zim begin to wriggle and snarl, so he jammed the heel of his shoe against the alien's mouth―hard.

Hard, coarse laughter boomed over the communication line, distorting the feed with its raw force. "GAHA-HA-HA! HE STOLE IT!" The officer leaned off-camera. "DID YOU HEAR THAT, GUS? STOLE IT!!"

Dib lifted his shoulders and let out a weak, nervous laugh.

"Ahh, you crazy nut!" The officer wiped tears from its eyes and motioned its gnarled paw dismissively. "Go on! Get outta here! Parking for the Archive is down that-a-way."

* * *

Zim, after wrestling his way back into the pilot seat, brought them down to the vast parking lot down below. Though "parking lot" felt like a misnomer; it appeared more like a parking country, a parking _ continent_. Millions of ships of wildly different kinds and sizes packed in cluttered rows as far as the eye could see; one could hardly see the asphalt underneath, for all the dainty sputtering scuttle ships, broad carrier fleets of harsh design and stature, taxi cruisers decorated with gaudy paints and bells. Once their ship landed in a rare empty spot, they crawled out and had to worm their way past a pack of squid-faced aliens puffing on glass pipes and squabbling over payment.

GIR was ordered to stay with the ship and defend it with his life. The robot agreed―or at least made a show of agreement, with a nod and _ mm-hmm _with its eyes still glued to its portable television screen.

As the two squeezed through parked shuttles and ventured toward the great, white obelisk jettisoning up from a distant point of ground and piercing the sky―the stem of the Archive's funnel, Dib now realized, which must serve as the entryway―Dib could look up and appreciate its true scale. The clouds of the planet's atmosphere obscured a clear view of the Archive's upper part, but its shadow darkened the world and left the lot dependent on the countless, glaring floodlights that lined the rows of silent vehicles.

Dib could see an ever-growing number of aliens moving around them. Security towers hummed with red light and surveillance chatter nearby, causing his stomach to constrict. He eyed the back of Zim's head. The Irken had put on his human "disguise" in an attempt at concealing his identity, and he started to wonder if this would work. Humans may have been naive and ignorant enough to fall for it, but would other aliens fail to see through the plastic contacts and poorly-constructed wig?

But as it turned out, the place was too busy and impersonal for anyone to notice. No one bothered looking in their direction for long, and soon they joined an anonymous crowd clustered at the foot of the metal obelisk.

Dib eyed the line and became nervous. "So… is it going to take a long time? To get in?"

"Doubt it," Zim said. "It's a week-day."

Within minutes, their group of nearly thirty individuals were greeted with an open sliding door and a free elevator car, which they all filed into. Red carpet lay beneath their feet, like theater carpet without the uncomfortable stickiness, and seating, also a bit like the ones you'd find in a theater, lined the walls and encircled the center of the car. Dib had never seen an elevator car this enormous, and neither had he ever seen one fitted with seating. It looked more like a lush train cabin than a simple lift. The car eventually shuddered into movement, lifting all its passengers into the air, and after thirty minutes, Dib came to realize why there were seats. 

A screen overhead featured a cyclopsian alien babbling in a language Dib did not understand, with occasional, inscrutable imagery floating into view. From what he could decipher, it seemed to be offering history or information about the Archive's structure.

He looked at the twig-thin alien in the seat at his right―a stuffy, berobed reptilian perusing an old manuscript―then looked back to his left, where Zim sat in silent stasis, no doubt well-acquainted with waiting in long queues with nothing to do.

Dib lamented to himself, "Should have brought a book."

* * *

After a long, kafkaesque stint in the rising elevator car, they were met with an equally exasperating wait in line for the front entrance. At least the large, ovular platform had a thrilling view: a vast glass wall allowed Dib, for a moment, to understand the tremendous height at which they stood above the shimmering planet down below.

"Quit your squirming," Zim yelped suddenly, like a parent scolding a wandering child. He tugged Dib by the arm back into line and adjusted his wig sweatily. "We're almost in, and I don't want YOU blowing this!"

_ You're the one yelling_, Dib thought, but chose not to add fuel to the argument. They were already getting strange looks from their scholarly company.

Some twenty spaces behind, Dib spotted the security counter and a turnstile which visitors were filing through. When he saw the first individual at the front of the line hand over a sheet of paper and tablet for scanning, he wasn't too worried. But the next few aliens similarly produced important-looking documentation and were ushered through the gate only when those items were processed. Dib felt a distinct sinking feeling the closer they drew to the front. Had Zim forgotten something?

At last, they reached the security desk. The librarian's sullen, reddened eyes peered over its heavy glasses and down on the two of them; they must have looked remarkably odd standing together. That was when Dib noticed the prominent poster on the wall next to her head featuring a generic Irken face, with a red X and warning written across it. He felt sweat build around his collar.

"Pass," the librarian finally grunted, paw out and motioning for identification.

"Uh." Dib glanced helplessly back at Zim, who shrugged. "We… don't have one?"

"We desire KNOWLEDGE!" Zim announced, still being no help.

"Ah. Tourists," the librarian affirmed, nodding with solemn understanding. "Gimme a sec. LAG!" The librarian abruptly banged its fist on an unseen button, and a clunky mechanical whirring sound began from beneath the counter. A metal panel burst forward, revealing a hidden compartment and a package tumbling out onto the floor: a layered titanium cube. The librarian spoke: "LAG, initiate the Visitation Sequence."

And the cube buzzed, broke apart, and molded itself into a tall, cylindrical shape. A wheel bolted out of its approximate waist, and a small monitor popped out of a slot at the top of its head. A blankly-smiling emoticon face looked back at the two of them. "WELL!" A ringing, joyful, blipping voice popped out from poor-quality speakers at the side of its head. "Look what we've got here! Visitors!"

"Uh…"

With a warm Southern twang that could have come from a human aunt, the robot nodded. "Nice to meet y'all! I'm LAG, the Library Assistant and Guide! I'll be leading your tour today!" Her face flickered red as she scanned them. "I can see I have visitors from the wonderful planets of [ERROR] and [ERROR] today! What fun! This sure is a long way from [HOME PLANET CAPITAL]!"

While Dib appeared confused and intimidated, Zim scratched the side of his head and grimaced. Another day, another dumb robot.

"If you would follow me," LAG said, already wheeling off to a separate, dark hallway, "we can get this tour underway!"

* * *

What the rolling robot led them to was not a wing of the library, but a dull, glass-encased walkway that soon greeted them with smiling signs and museum-style displays. From the silence of the hall, punctuated only by the padding footsteps on the velvet-carpeted floor, they could tell this area was not well-attended.

The robot chirped and stopped at the glass wall overlooking the library wing below. At last, Dib had a chance to see; he hurried and pressed his face against it to get a better view.

"Welcome to the Universal Archive! As visitors, I'm sure you already know that this is the most expansive collection of culturally-relevant text in the known material universe! We of the Archive Preservation Committee pride ourselves in ensuring that the works here continue to be available for study to all sentient species!*"

(Did it just _ say _an asterisk?)

"*Except Irkens. They had their chance and they blew it. Literally."

(Ah.)

"Today, the grounds are primarily under the protection and management of our Benefactors, the Meekrobian Empire. The ruins of the first Archive drifted into their solar system many millennia ago, and ever since, they have been responsible for its curation. No one knows what mysterious, all-powerful civilization could have first constructed it, though some theorize they were some kind of… Psychic… apes… Or something, I dunno."

Through the clear, crystalline glass, Dib could see the pearly expanse of the bookshelves below, lined into a seemingly infinite expanse. He couldn't see the end of them, but could see alien scholars doting along the nearby open rows, drawing books from lowers shelves, taking antigravity lifts to the higher ones, or managing their search via large, projected computer screens that glimmered at a central hub.

"Each major documented civilization has a section dedicated to its history, literary works, scientific contributions, and notable authors. Here, we see the Meekrobian wing. It's the largest section―"

Zim hacked a loogie of disdain. "_ Of course_," he sneered.

LAG hesitated, but overlooked his disrespect. "--But we're currently in the middle of the painstaking work needed to expand the other libraries. Now, once you're done looking, we can…"

"Wait. Um, miss?" Dib raised his hand unnecessarily. "Where's the Irken section? That's what we're both here fo―"

"Pleasesaveyourquestionsfortheendofthetour, THANKYEEEWWW~!" LAG wheeled away to its next scripted spot.

Dib lowered his hand, sighed, and trudged after it.

Unfortunately, for the next few minutes, the two were captive to a long row of old tomes and artifacts sealed under glass. None of it was of much interest, except maybe the glowing alien armor and a few of the miscellaneous weapons that had been donated over the millennia. As the tour dragged on, Zim continued to eyeball the walls and transparently contemplate his escape. Dib tried to be more subtle.

"Now, now THIS one is an exciting item! This ancient leather-bound volume is made with the skin of some hideous, unknown animal! Sometimes, it still twitches!"

Both Zim and Dib squirmed in boredom, yet the robot persisted, unabated.

"Ooh! This next book is a favorite in our tour. It's an entire volume of Holdarin dirty limericks from nearly fifty-thousand years ago! Would you like me to recite one?"

The two gave a sideways glance at one another, and came to a silent agreement. Dib answered, "No thanks."

"Suit yourself!" LAG actually seemed disappointed. "But I hear they make great icebreakers at cocktail parties!" The robot wheeled towards a doorway at the end of the hall and lingered a moment as they caught up. "Well, everyone, it seems we've reached the last stop of our tour! If you follow me, we'll arrive at the Archive Memorial Fountain and close out with Q&A. Good? GOOD!"

The doorway brought them into a dark, open chamber. As his eyes adjusted, Dib realized the space stood beneath an ornate dome, gilded with script; the floor echoed with footsteps on limestone, and a glistening, impressive water fountain stood at the center, bubbling a stream of water from the mouth of a brass sculpture shaped much like the current Archive. Ethereal light cast from floor panels gave the room and the sculpture a haunted feel.

LAG continued to rattle on: "This Memorial Fountain was constructed in memory of the first Archive. In its tragic end, countless digital records, manuscripts, and bound books were heartlessly murdered."

Dib raised an eyebrow. "Um… 'Murdered'?"

"By the Irken Menace, many millennia ago," she explained, not apologizing for the peculiar word choice. "We estimate billions of written works were permanently lost in that attack. Less than five percent of the current Archive's collection hails from the original."

Dib fought the temptation to glance back at Zim in exasperation. Of all things for a race to do, wiping out priceless historical documents seemed even more senseless than genocide. It struck him then, though, that this confirmed something: maybe the Irken Empire had something to _ hide _.

"That brings us to the end! Gee, you've been a great group! Any questions before I direct you to the exit?"

Dib, weary and relieved, raised a hand.

"Yes, little girl?"

"I'm not…" (_Ugh, whatever_). "Do we get to enter the Archive now?"

"Oh, heavens, no!" The guide giggled good-naturedly. "For the security and preservation of these precious files, our Benefactors have limited access to those who applied for an appointment and have been adequately screened!"

Dib grumbled, but they could afford to wait, couldn't they? "Okay, so, how long would that take?"

"Oh! Well! Lucky you!" An alert dinged on its expression screen. "An appointment slot has just opened up! And in only sixteen years!"

"What? Sixteen YEARS?!" Dib shook his head. "We just need one section! In and out in fifteen minutes."

"I'm sorry, but I can't let you do that! Security is of utmost importance!"

Zim suddenly uttered, loud enough for him to hear, "Elevator."

He was right. An elevator was posted at the other side of the chamber, unguarded besides the exit.

"We need to get going," Zim hissed, snaring Dib's coat collar with his claws.

"Yeah, I know, I know. Uh. Wait, I think I've got something." Dib turned back, approached the robot, and cleared his throat. He tried his best to look unassuming. "Hey, uh… Could you divide twenty-six by zero?"

The smiling face icon blinked into a blue color; a puzzled emoticon with question marks floated across the LED screen. "What's that, now, hon?"

"This. Statement. Is. False."

Her confused icon turned to a stern frowny face. She seemed unaffected, yet irritated by the attempts. "Please stop that. That is _ not _ how robots work."

"Uncle Jim and Uncle Joe walk into a barbershop―"

Finally, Zim harrumphed, shoved Dib aside, and jammed a fork into the power socket in the side of the robot's face. After the attendant finished screaming and vomiting sparks, it slumped and collapsed face-first on the ground.

Dib, startled and shaken, had to catch his breath. "Dude…!"

But Zim sniffed and gave its stunned body a rude and hateful kick. "That was an annoying waste of time. Let's go."

On their way to the elevator, the robot stirred and coughed only to offer a wheezy, desperate plea after them: "Don't forget to visit our gift shop―for novelty shot glasses and key chains―!"

The doors shut.

* * *

_ Irb-… Ird-… Irg-… _

How many civilizations out there could possibly begin with 'Ir'? After walking through five library wings, Dib began to despair of ever reaching their destination. The worst was that they could not dawdle to take in the delightful, tantalizing sights, smells, and sounds of the active Archive; with security soon on the alert about their trespassing, they had to move with a briskness that gave Dib only a passing view. Studious aliens of various species eyed them with suspicion, sensing they did not belong, so they took to ducking between shelves and finding labyrinth-like passageways that wove through the library.

Then, at last, they reached a white, steel doorway into the next wing. 'Irk,' a sign above it read.

Where the other wings had appeared much the same, each with open rows of books and kiosks and humming archival search engines, Irk's wing immediately stuck out. First, the doorway had been taped off with some yellow, suspended warning sign (that they both, with ease, stepped under). The interior, too, looked darker than the rest of the building, and its condition, neglected.

They tiptoed inside, reaching as far into the corridor as they could before the light from the prior wing became too dim. Before they could find any lighting, they could still feel the chasm of its shape, the way it echoed their footsteps and hummed with solitude. At last, Zim found an electrical panel and wrenched some power back on; the overhead lights sputtered and sparked a moment, then blinked on.

The room looked, most generously, like a corpse picked clean by carrion birds. Grand-scale shelves of stainless steel stood high over their heads and swirled about the walls and space in a twisted conch-shell swirl, but they stood empty, decaying, choked with dust. As the alien and human pair began their tentative and skeptical journey along the frame, they found only the occasional undisturbed book, sometimes sitting together in pairs, sometimes in sad, toppled clumps at the end of a shelf, but mostly alone, discarded, crumpled, face-down. There seemed to be enough space for several Earth libraries' worth of books, but Dib saw hardly enough books to fill the table in a doctor's waiting room. Dib had never thought about how depressing a library would be without its books, but now, he felt it, and it was a miserable heartbreak.

"Geez," he said aloud. He picked up a book deformed by mold and exposure, then dropped it in disgust. "Is this _ it_?"

Zim, perhaps also disappointed, or perhaps secretly relieved, only continued to walk and scrounge, saying nothing.

Trying not to lose hope, Dib proceeded to pluck books from the shelves and turn them over in an investigative fashion. They had promising titles, like _ A Natural History of Irk _ , _ Irken Society Done Five Ways_, _ Irken Recipes for the Unrefined Palate_, _ Pronunciation of the Irken Language (Without Surgery), _ and _ Irken Architecture: For Dummies, By Dummies_. But regardless of which book he pulled from the shelf, opening them revealed the same thing: crude, scribbled vandalism defacing every page, cover-to-cover. Doodles depicting devilish grins, rude gestures, and the emblem of the Empire were accompanied with messages such as:

_ Irk rulez! _

_ Meekrobianz drool! _

_ Tallest 4 Eva _

_ The Irken Empire rocks!! _

Evidently, the Archive had not been successful in keeping Irkens out.

Dib chucked each one to the floor in frustration; Zim guffawed and giggled at his race's petty victory, but he forced himself to sober up as it became increasingly obvious that Irk had sabotaged their quest for information. What's more, Dib couldn't find any books that talked about PAK coding or any reference to Irken mythology. No book confessed any details about "Mother," or even hinted at Irken origins.

Seeing as they didn't have much material to skim, however, they chose to continue their futile search, and after much sorting and sighing and chucking items to the side, Dib wandered toward a dark wall at the far side of the room. Zim had climbed a shelf and started kicking manuscripts down the floor, so the human stayed out of the way and eyeballed the wall's shelves in the meanwhile. That's when he noticed an ancient, non-functional radiator (or something like it; it had pipes and was sticking out of the wall) fitted between two of the shelving units, and though he didn't examine it closely, something out of place caught his attention. A folder. Or… something. It was sticking out from under the pipes. Dib had to crouch down to his hands and knees to fix the tips of fingers on it and draw it out onto the floor. It slid out without ceremony or importance and, indeed, it appeared very plain and shabby. It wasn't even a "book": it was a ring binder, with loose pages either fastened or taped together with no real care. By looking it over, Dib determined it had _ once been _a book, bound and published like any other, but it was being held in this current form because of long-sustained age and damage.

The cover, the original, yellowing title page taped to the front, revealed the book's title.

"_On Qway Biology: A Survey of Sloo's Sentient Life_." At first, Dib shrugged. "What's a Qway and a Sloo?"

Zim, hardly listening, dismissed, "I dunno."

"Huh. Must've been moved from another wing by accident."

Without warning, and startling Dib half to death, Zim appeared behind him and snatched it away. The alien let out a yelp of discovery, part in surprise and part in outrage. "Wait a second! There's Irken writing on this!"

"There… is?"

"Yes! Right here! The author's name!" Zim pointed at the cover, then turned the item over in his hand like he suspected a trap. "What IS the meaning of this? Irkens do not write BOOKS!"

"What? Lemme see!"

"Hands OFF!"

"Come ON, Zim!"

A brief, immature wrestling match followed, with hissing and poking and pulling, and at last Dib came out book in hand. He plopped down cross-legged onto the cold floor and leafed through the first few pages, as Zim sulked over him. The humans hands shook; finally, they had found something that looked―maybe not 'in tact,' but not thoroughly vandalized. "Okay, okay, okay. It says _ here _that the author was a researcher."

"What?!" 

"_Von'nen, the Biotic Programmer_. Woah. Sounds important. Is he famous?"

"I've never heard of him," Zim pronounced, speaking with final authority. "Must be a nobody quack."

Dib ignored him and found the first page. "Let's see… Here's the preface." He cleared his throat and began to read. "_With the help of OmniOrg, I began my campaign of education and outreach. I set out intending to test my theory that even the savage, undeveloped races could prove their worth to the Irken Society._" Dib's reading of the words slowed as he became uncomfortable with its tone. "Geez, that's… not very nice." He continued, "_My findings are documented here for the posterity of my Exalted Halanus, who funded this study, but as I believe scientific minds of all peoples will benefit from this research, I have chosen to also submit this manuscript copy, along with the rest of my corpus, to the Universal Archive..._" As Dib reflected on how un-Irken the sentiment was―since when did the selfish, megalomaniac race share their research for the common good?--he began to sift through the file more quickly. "Man, there's lots of stuff missing. Whole pages―chapters, even."

"That's no surprise. He probably sent this to the _ first _Universal Archive."

"...Why…? Oh." Dib's eyelids lowered. "Right. Irkens blew it up."

"Indeed," Zim said proudly, fastening his fists to his hips, "we sure did!"

Dib, distraught by Zim's inability to understand the gravity of such an event, shook his head. "Man. What's with you guys and libraries?"

"Books are stupid," Zim answered with a grimace. "They think they're so… Smart, and full of information. Pah! Everything Irkens need to know is in the Empire's database. All outside knowledge is non-essential."

Dib gave him a withering, despondent look.

"WHAT? What is it?"

"I'm… waiting for you to see the irony… but… eh." Dib flipped through a few more pages, but matters only seemed to get more confusing, not less. "So, what's the 'Irken Society'? Is that a thing?"

"Irkens have a society," Zim answered, clearly misunderstanding his question. "We're not savages."

"No, no, THIS! He keeps mentioning it; he calls it 'THE Society.' What is that? A secret order? A special group running things behind the scenes? AN IRKEN ILLUMINATI?"

"Your brain fluid must be leaking," Zim countered, voice dull with disinterest. "It's an old book, and uses dumb-sounding old-timey words, that's all."

The fluttering in Dib's chest softened. He took in a few steady, practiced breaths, withdrawing from his old pattern of ramped-up hysteria. _ Okay, okay_, he told himself. Keep it together. Zim was probably right. Language could become archaic and shift around. And besides, nothing in the book mentioned or emphasized any cryptic elements: no codes, no symbols, no puzzles. Its author, rather, babbled quite straightforwardly about all of his discoveries, and spoke openly about his mission's successes and failures.

Dib then landed on a page with a fully-colored illustration of an adult Qway, detailed with loving care. The creatures looked mostly insectoid, like human-sized mantids, with four arms and narrow, long bodies standing on two grasshopper legs; their segmented, rainbow-flecked eyes stuck out the sides of their head, above rather ugly pairs of mandibles. The drawings also depicted different colorations, with some Qway orange and striped like tigers, some an iridescent blue, some blood-red. And yet another picture showed their wingspan: beetle wings that, like their faces and bodies, bore a startling array of colors and patterns when unfurled from their backs.

Dib spent several moments just looking over these intricate pictures, struck with awe and marvel. 

Zim, meanwhile, stole a quick glance over his shoulder and retched dramatically. "Ugh! What kind of Irken would dedicate their precious time to researching such hideous livestock? And then BLABBING about all of his findings to these pencil-necks, instead of handing them over to the Empire! What a pathetic specimen he must have been."

"Hey!" Dib, on impulse, snatched the book toward his chest. "He just took his research seriously, that's all!"

Zim, reading the shrill defensiveness in his voice, smirked and guffawed with profound, cruel amusement. "Ohh, I apologize. I didn't mean to besmirch your _ dead, new friend_."

Dib looked at him in surprise more than hurt. "...Dead?"

"Of course he's dead! The first Archive was destroyed thousands of years ago."

Oh, yeah. Finding him and talking to him was out of the question, then. Except…

Dib sprang up from the floor. "I need a computer," he said.

Near the taped-off entrance, they found a console that had not been touched in some time. A thick layer of dust peeled away from the keypanel and the screen crackled sleepily into consciousness, glowing a pale blue light and twinkling with massive amounts of alien script.

By now, Dib had gotten used to speaking to inanimate objects, so once he saw the console was awake, he asked, "Computer, can you cross-reference something? Just don't include this book." He pointed at the file in his hand.

A quick blip of red light scanned the file, and the screen answered in a toneless, digital voice, "Affirmative. Exempting this source from following searches."

"Cross reference 'Sloo' and 'Qway.'"

Zim hissed at him and clawed at his arm, roughly pulling him back. "Why are you wasting our time with this?"

"Shh!"

Only a moment later, the computer answered: "_312 sources found that reference to the term 'Sloo.' No results for the cross-reference 'Sloo' + 'Qway.' _"

"Wait. NO other books talk about them?"

"_There are 0 references to the term 'Qway,' _" the computer affirmed.

"So they're extinct," Zim said. He sounded unsurprised "The Irken Empire must have made quick work of the ugly things."

As usual, Zim spoke with frightening, misguided confidence, like his explanation presented no room for questions; Dib, though, arched an eyebrow and felt profoundly confused. "What? That… Doesn't make any sense. There's got to be _ records_…" Another wriggle of doubt stirred in his chest. He felt the weight of the book in his hands, and he let it fall open again, displaying once more the illustrations of the forgotten, and perhaps annihilated, creatures. The drawings and writings didn't add up. There was a fondness of the subjects in these pages, wonder, careful consideration. It lacked the condescension and hostility one should expect from an Irken author. "I don't get it," he said, shaking his head in disbelief. "Why study them like this? Why spend all this time and energy…? All that, and the Irkens just kill them all…?"

"It's what Irkens do," Zim said. "We infiltrate, document a race's weaknesses, and then destroy them."

Dib, seized by an inescapable need to find an answer, returned to the console. "Computer: search for all other works by this author."

"_Exempting this source, search has recovered 0 available sources and 4 unavailable sources. _"

"'Unavailable'? Why?"

"_Items are unavailable for access or check-out,_" the computer answered, seemingly unable to process his question. But he could assume the books had been physically destroyed, even if vestigial records existed. "_Display list _?"

"Okay, sure."

"_Synthesis of Bio-schematics in Artificial Intelligence; The Genetic and Chemical Components in Behavior; Mechanistic Transmutation of Nerve Cell Input; Integration of Wetware and Hardware Memory Systems_." 

Dib scratched his chin. "It almost sounds like… Irken PAK stuff?"

The boy's attempts at detective work only agitated the already-impatient Zim; the alien shoved him aside to look for himself, as if he could reach a different conclusion and therefore prove the human child wrong. "HMM. It _could_ be."

"Hey, if he knows anything about PAK's, he might know how to fix yours!"

"Yes," Zim drawled, mocking him, "let's locate his fossilized remains and interrogate them."

"No, you idiot, his BOOKS! He only sent copies to the Archive; maybe the original manuscripts still exist someplace!"

An alarm sounded.

At first, neither of them recognized it as an alarm, although the buzzer startled them into an abrupt pause in their conversation; a red light over the doorway flashed with a warning glow. Shouts carried from a distance.

It was time to go.

* * *

After ducking under the yellow warning tape, they spotted the trouble. Large, football-player-sized aliens stalked through the shelves, shifting under heavy, dark plates of armor that concealed even their faces. These guards moved with deceptive speed, and within seconds, they nearly covered the distance between them, so Dib and Zim promptly dropped their complacency and broke into a full run in the other direction.

"That's them!" They heard the familiar, twanging voice of LAG squeal across the room. "Quick! They're trying to learn without a permit! STOP THEM!"

A throaty roar of what must have been a dozen monstrous guards shook the entire floor; other scholars doting on the shelves and books froze, looking about in stupefied terror. Zim, moving at a pace several steps ahead, brutally shoved an impish professor aside, which very nearly toppled the stack of books in its grasp onto Dib's head. Dib didn't even complain, he was so busy puffing for air and scrambling through the narrow shelfway.

Dib didn't dare turn around to look, but he could swear he felt footsteps with the heft of elephants fast approaching. The ground felt ready to rupture under his feet at any moment; he hobbled, he wheezed, he tried not to scream.

Then he came to realize what Zim had them running toward. A huge glass wall looking out over the stars: the last boundary between the outer rim of the Archive's mouth and endless space.

Zim snaked his communication extension from his PAK and immediately began screaming orders. "GIR! My location! Now! Get us OUT of here!"

Had the order gone through? Dib couldn't tell, and it seemed as if it was too late. They reached the wall, tantalizingly inches away from freedom, only to be surrounded on every side by snarling guards.

LAG wheeled her way between the broad arms of the security. The screen composing her face flickered with repressed anger and frustration. "Well! I never!" She offered them both a scolding glance, then saw the book nestled under Dib's arm. "So you're thieves, are you! No doubt Irken agents. Y'all really thought you'd get away, huh?"

Ever vexed, Zim growled again into his extension: "_GIR_."

"Now, NOW! It's our policy to give trespassers a bit of an educational beating, but if you would hand over that book nice and easy, maybe I'll ask these boys not to thrash you too bad."

Dib looked about in desperation. While Zim fussed with the transmitter, he could do nothing but quake in his boots and wonder which of his bones would snap first. He had no weapons. No escape. No recourse. The guards stood over him, shadows of cracking knuckles and beady-eyed malice. He quivered. Then, in a blind and mad movement, he lunged for a nearby bookshelf and seized the first item he could.

"B-back off!" he said, dizzy with fear. "Or I'll―I'll throw this―" (He glanced at what he'd grabbed). "_Memoir _ into the wrong section!"

LAG screeched. "_What _?"

"What's that over there?" As he readied his flinging arm, he squinted at the next shelf over. "Narrative nonfiction?"

"Stop! STOP!" LAG spun like a top and sparked with sizzling rage. "Stop that RIGHT NOW!"

He aimed.

"LISTEN!" The robot burst into nervous, uncomfortable, assuaging laughter. "O-okay, hon, let's… All just CALM DOWN and not do anything we'll regret!"

Just as the standoff began, though, one of the guards grunted in confusion and pointed; LAG hesitated, question marks bubbled across her LED screen.

Behind them. They turned and found, bobbing suspended in space behind the glass wall, the Voot Runner. The howling void of intelligence that was GIR stared back at them, eyes glowing and blank, tongue dangling stupidly until it squealed and waved. "HI!" (Its voice echoed through Zim's comm extension.

Rather than express gratitude for its quick arrival, Zim shouted into the microphone. "GIR, it's about time you showed up! As soon as we break through these MORONS, help us get out of here!"

GIR gauged the situation. Its eyes traveled dimly between the guards, the LAG robot, Dib, and its master. It watched a faint reflection of itself glimmer in the glass, and felt the rumbling power of the ship's thrusters sputtering away beneath it.

GIR grinned and pried the control stick backwards.

"GIR…?"

The Voot runner scooted a few yards back, then paused in place.

"GIR! GIR, for the love of IRK, do NOT do what I think you're about to―"

"SMASHY-SMASH!""

The Voot runner quaked, bolted forward, then collided at near-full speed into the glass wall. The surface shuddered, made a tremendous racket, but did not yield.

A few guards, wisely, began to shout and crowd the stairs; others scattered in their fright, or ducked behind bookshelves.

Zim screamed until his voice went hoarse. "There's an emergency exit dock RIGHT OVER THERE, GIR―!"

But GIR made loud, passionate noises of exertion, then pulled back to ram the glass once more. Both Dib and Zim were knocked back from the impact this time, and the barrier began to spiderweb, buckling under pressure. The last of the guards and library visitors scurried away in alarm, knowing what would come next.

"GIR I DEMAND AND ORDER YOU TO STOP THIS AT―"

Third time was the charm. The sound was too cataclysmic to even process, except that it featured a bang, a shattering, and a howling like a billion angry ghosts. The entire Archive rattled and moaned, its lights flickering off as the vacuum of space yanked apart its interior. Screams surrounded them on all sides while helpless creatures clung to shelves and infrastructure to avoid being blasted out through the sudden hole. Only by a miracle and a leap of well-aimed faith, Zim and Dib then fell into the sucking pit and were swallowed by the familiar maw of the Voot.

Dib landed face-first on the floor. For several horrible moments, he could not find air to breathe in the space about him; he wheezed and hacked and pawed desperately along the cabin floor, and felt like his lungs had gone flat. The sound of a giant, metal machine ripping out from under a sheet of broken glass followed, and it rang with a ear-piercing scream, showers of sparks, and a crackling blast of silica shards falling on his head like angry, sharp hail.

"GET US OUT OF HERE, GIR!"

Dib was startled by how close this shouting was. He turned his head and found, not but a foot away, Zim snared by loose cables that had fallen from the ceiling.

The Voot was moving, at last. The shield fell, and fresh, breathable oxygen rushed back into the cabin. Dib gasped.

It took a moment to get his bearings, but after a few seconds, he discovered several things. He was mostly unhurt, save for some scrapings on his fingers. The ship was careening away from the Archive at top speed, at the guidance of a humming GIR. And the book. The book was still under his arm. He placed a hand on top of the cover and sighed.

Zim griped, "Well that was a DISASTER."

Dib didn't think so. Not at all. Still, he looked out at the quickly-disappearing Archive― as it shrank from their view, he could see the size and impact of the hole. "Uh, are they going to be okay?"

Zim finally untangled himself, kicked Gir out of the pilot's seat, and pulled a lever. "Huh? Oh, sure. They'll be fine."

The Archive rocked, and screamed, and splintered.


	6. The Lonely Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zim and Dib unbury something unexpected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah what?!?
> 
> Yes, I'm still... slowly poking away at this. For obvious reasons, life, work, and my personal schedule have been disrupted. But you can blame the delay mostly on Animal Crossing. 
> 
> Friends, stay safe, and enjoy this moment of respite from the world.

Dib slept.

And as he slept, he dreamed a strange dream. He awoke on a ship somewhere―another Irken ship―hovering in the dead of space. And he looked down at his hands, and they were Irken; and he looked out upon the universe through Irken eyes.

He adjusted his glasses. (Did Irkens wear glasses? In his dream, this did not matter).

He plucked a journal from a massive pile of papers, flipped through the inky pages of his notes, and found, at last, a blank page onto which he could write. He could feel the excitement humming in his brain and he drew out a charcoal pencil and began to dictate the readings from his screen. After recording what he could, he couldn't help but begin to sketch the planet's contours, its beautiful rings of light, its murky clouds.

He wrote the date, then began his journal thusly: _ I have arrived at Sloo. It is, in a word, breathtaking. From space, I can identify biomes of diverse kinds: deserts, jungle, savannah, tundra. Surely, it must be hospitable to advanced life. The discoveries I make will be indispensable! _

Finally, in a voice not his own, but smaller and strange, he said, "OmniOrg. Scan the surface for sentient life. We should―"

* * *

THUMP. RATTLE.

Dib jumped back into consciousness, heart in his throat. A wave of pain snarled his neck muscles, caused, he realized, by the sharp angle of steel he'd been sleeping on. The frail journal, open and resting on his chest, slid onto the floor as he rolled onto his side.

THUMP.

The sound that initially awakened him shook the ship once more; it drummed against the carapace, like fistfuls of sand against sheet metal. Whatever Zim was navigating through, it was skirting underneath and creating a racket.

Dib sighed, stood to his feet, and rubbed his aching back. The cabin had not been designed with sleep in mind; the only way he'd managed to find a spot was by fitting his body into an uncomfortable, contorted position across cables, panels, and components. As he came to steady himself against the back of Zim's pilot seat, he realized that there was another biological function that was not likely to be accommodated. He swallowed a huff of discomfort. Shouldn't have drank all that soda right at lift-off.

"Hey… Morning… Or whatever this is."

Zim didn't respond to his pleasantries beyond a grunt.

Through the glass, Dib could see and assess their progress: as he suspected, the ship glided over the dusty ring of a purple gas giant, and the granules and chips of ice skimmed the ship's hull harmlessly. This leg of the trip, Zim had warned him, would take longer than the first. Jumps could send an Irken shuttle from point A to point B in a flash, but one jump depletes a fuel cell, which meant they had spent that shortcut already. Until Zim could find a planet with refueling facilities, they would be traveling at a more sensible speed.

"How's it going up here?"

The Irken shot him a hostile glance. 

"Are we almost there?"

Zim changed the subject so that he could kick the console and gripe, "I don't know how you convinced me to follow you down this ridiculous path. Sloo's a useless wasteland!"

"Have you been there before?"

"Of course not."

"Then how do you know it's useless?"

Zim, stunned, slacked his jaw. His sputtering erupted more furiously than before. "S-SILENCE! FOOL! The Irken Empire has a LIST of worthwhile planets ripe for conquering! And Sloo is CERTAINLY not on it! That MAKES it useless!"

"I thought the Armada just moved in a straight line," Dib said, motioning its path in his hands.

With a twitching brow, Zim jerked forward, away from him. "Don't…! Pester me while I'm piloting."

Dib sighed deeply. The alien might have made some strides toward independent thought, but the urge to defend his society ran strong. The boy almost complied and withdrew, but a sudden discomfort reminded him of his predicament. There was no way getting around it now. He squirmed. "So, Zim, what's the, uh, bathroom situation in here?"

Zim acknowledged without turning around, "Your odor has indeed grown exponentially worse since we left, but bathing now would be inconvenient."

"What? No! Not a― I need to―" Dib decided to cease being coy. "I need a toilet."

Zim threw his head back with a powerful, screechy guffaw ringing with derision and surprise. "Ahh, yes! I've forgotten all about your species' _ obsolete _ organ functions." The alien cast a smarmy look over his shoulder. "Irken ships have no such things."

Dib glanced frantically about the interior cabin. "What do you do, then? When you have to―you know?"

"The Irken form is a model of efficient energy-management," Zim bragged. "The PAK ensures it accepts only precise nutrition, uses every calorie, recycles fats and fluids, and compresses waste. I merely clear the byproduct filter once every few weeks."

"Oh." Dib thought about this for only a second. He had wanted to know more about Irken biology, but this wasn't exactly the first lesson he wanted. "Gross."

"What's truly _ revolting _is the amount of toxic sludge you humans expels on a daily basis."

"Well, I really gotta go."

"Ah―tch―URGH!" Zim waved him away, twitchy with impatience. "Just… reabsorb!"

"That's NOT how it works!"

"Surely you can find some manner of tube to expel it outside. Now, leave me be! I'm trying to focus."

"No way! I am _ not _ doing that. C'mon, Zim, can't we land somewhere? Just for a break? What about that planet there?"

"The one clearly made of toxic clouds?"

Dib adjusted his pointing a few inches to the right. "Er… That one?"

"That's a comet."

"PLEASE," Dib groaned. "I'm DYING."

Though Zim would have readily continued this argument with a string of foul epithets, his attention continued to be pulled toward the blinking console at the helm. At last, he noticed a blinking light of interest. He sat up and hummed a querying sound. "That's strange," the alien remarked. He leaned in for the console screen. "There's a repair-request signal coming from somewhere."

"Wh-what?"

"It's weak…" Zim's voice strained. "And it's Irken."

Dib hopped to and fro. "Well GREAT let's LAND and INVESTIGATE."

"Control your bladder, monkey! False distress signals are a classic trap! Now― what _ is _ this place? This quadrant is hardly mapped at all―"

He clawed open a display screen, found the signal's coordinates pointing to some planetary body.

The console only read: ▓▒▓▒▓.

Zim screwed up his eyes, rubbed the screen, cursed. "What is WRONG with this thing?" He gave the console a smack with his fist, which caused a flare of pixels to sizzle over the screen. The text remained indecipherable. "Stupid, broken piece of―! Display PROPERLY!"

But Dib, looking at the same screen, said, "What are you talking about? It says ▓▒▓▒▓."

Zim blinked at him, stupefied. "What??"

"▓▒▓▒▓…?" Dib's voice crackled and fizzed, but he overcame his fear of Zim's wrath to insistently point. "Right there. See? ▓-▒-▓-▒-▓. Can't you read?"

"Are you _ mocking _ me?"

"ZIM, I'M TELLING YOU, IT SAYS ▓▒▓▜▒▓▓▒░▟▚▓▒▓▓▞▛▒▓▒▓▟▓▒░▋▓▙▒▓."

* * *

...Jungle.

Insects whirring, the clap of condensation on thick foliage, birds warbling their mating cries, branches so thick that the ground lay in perpetual night, asleep, cool, writhing.

...

Was it the memory of a jungle? The way sunlight rippled through leaves seemed, for a moment, like the blip of faulty software. Noise jammed. Colors swam with pixels and bits.

A voice he didn't recognize: _ now, come on, then, we have to set up― _

* * *

Zim squealed and seized, his leg thrusting upward and clanging a shin against a metal pipe. The biting cold of steel touched his cheek. As his eyes peeled open and popped socket-wise into place, a strange creature came into view, with black, hair-like legs, glassy eyes, a peculiar torso of black fabric.

Then he realized it was Dib, upside-down.

Everything hurt, and as he came to, he heard the soft protests of his control console alerting him to trouble. The alien's eyes wandered the room, then fell upon the windshield. Shocking, vibrant green plants cluttered its view.

"Huh?"

He heard a ribbit and saw that an amphibian's hindquarters rested on the exterior of the glass.

Then, Dib spoke. "Well, you're finally up," he announced.

Zim's throat clenched, raw with thirst and strain. "'Finally'? WHAT HAPPENED?"

"We crash landed. You don't remember?"

"What? How? Why!?"

"Why?" Pale and exasperated now that the threat of fiery death had passed, Dib yelped, "Because you passed out!"

"Well―! WELL! I'M SO SORRY THAT MY MALFUNCTIONING BODY IS INCONVENIENT FOR YOU!"

Perhaps the boy recognized the folly of his complaining; he stepped over the grid and sighed wearily, his plodding steps bringing him to Zim's collapsed body. Standing over him, he offered a hand in a casual, unfriendly gesture of assistance. "Was it your PAK again?"

Zim, legs crumpled, eyed the hand and panicked. He slapped the hand away and proceeded to groan and twist about in an effort to pull himself together. Between puffs of exertion, he bemoaned, "Yes, and _ you _ were supposed to have fixed it! I should have never―!" Finally, his introspection caught up with him. "Hey," Zim murmured, lifting his aching head and steadying into an upright position, "why aren't we dead?"

"Your robot took over."

"What?" Zim gawked. "GIR did something COMPETENT for once?"

"Sort of? We didn't die, so…? That counts for something."

"GIR! Report on our location!"

Zim's cry into the din resulted in no response―no chipper, squeaky shout of compliance, no goofy non-sequitur. 

Zim swiveled his head about the cabin, but found them alone. "...GIR?"

"He went outside. To 'look for a pony ride,' he said."

"Surely he meant to say 'check the atmosphere.' We'll have to wait until it's completed before―"

"No, no," Dib said, waving his hands feebly, "it's fine. I already.. Uh… Stepped out to do my business."

In disbelief, Zim untangled himself and lunged to his feet; stress wore at his screeching throat. "FOOL! There could have been any number of undetectable toxins in the air! You… you… might have…!"

Dib arched an eyebrow at him.

"M-might have put ME in danger!"

"There are plants and animals out there," Dib said, ignoring Zim's yammering. "Besides, I checked. This Von'nen guy took notes on this place." Dib pulled the flimsy binder into view, propped open a page with diagrammed text, and pointed to a sketch of a celestial system. "'_ Reklo. A nearby habitable moon. Useful as a way-station, due to its mild climate and proximity to multiple major planets. The native river eels are especially delicious raw' _…?" Dib looked up, mildly disgusted. "He's definitely been here."

"Reklo?"

"Yeah, you said a signal was coming from here? So I told the robot to land us, and here we are."

Strange. Now that Zim thought on it, as he focused on the last images he could recall, it seemed obvious to him. Reklo. That was the name of the location that appeared on his console―clear as day. And he could remember the human boy, too, insistently telling him, _ Reklo, right here, see? I'm telling you it says REKLO. _

"Huh. Why does it sound…?"

Zim had a thought on the tip of his slithering tongue, but a sudden thrust of force into the ship knocked it out of him.

When the two scrambled out of the ship and staggered out onto the jungle undergrowth, they found GIR, successful in its quest for a mount: he straddled a rhinoceros-sized beast with blinking clusters of eyes and white, shaggy fur, its cry and pawing shaking the ground, its tusks ramming the underside of the Voot until the ship rolled onto its back.

"Master! Do you want a pony ride too??"

* * *

The beast returned to its leaf-munching herd, Zim commanded GIR to return to Voot to an upright position, and they assessed their surroundings.

The plant life, must like an Earthen jungle, clumped so thickly overhead that it choked out the sunlight that yet trickled through in gold speckles along the mossy ground. Vines snaked up tree trunks and dangled like hungry tentacles; flat and fern-like leaves shuddered with the scurrying of tiny animals beneath them; the drone of insects and sky-bound life hummed through the thick entanglement of branches. Dib squinted upward. He could barely make out a patch of sky, colored a rosy pink.

Far away, deep in the jungle, they could hear the occasional, thunderous crack of something large traversing the forest. They hoped it was more of those rhino-beasts.

Zim meant to pull out his wrist module and start tracking the distress call, but he found himself continually distracted. Just when he thought he could refocus, another sound would set him on edge, another image would stir a peculiar sense of… Knowing.

He tapped his claws on the module, eyes darting about, and wandered a few steps too far into a ditch. His feet hit the chilly, hushed flow of a creek. He frowned into it, then thought aloud. "I have a perfectly accurate record of every place I've ever been to. So I know I've never been here." He watched a thread of water wind about smooth purple stones, then ignite with rippling light. A slim silver eel dashed through the current. Zim furrowed his brow and managed to convey concern. "Then why…?"

A flare of light again, this time sharper, painful, pixelated. He yelped and forcefully blinked the static from his eyes.

"Zim?"

Footsteps approached from behind and rested at the top of the ditch.

"We'd better look for this distress-signal-thing," Dib called out. "Where'd you say it was?"

Zim grunted and trudged up the hill, shaking the water from his boots. He didn't understand all this, and what he didn't understand, he disliked. Better to turn his attention on something he could figure out on his own.

A short hike from their landing spot, five minutes at most through the thick underbrush, they tracked the signal to a broad clearing in the middle of the forest. The patch of dirt and grass spread out before them, blanketed in the shadows of trees and milky-pink light of the moon's orbiting star. Weeds with pungent white flowers led them down into a gentle slope that formed the clearing into the shape of a shallow bowl, and around its rims, clustered amid vines and brush, a close inspection revealed strange, metallic rods sticking out the earth. They towered overhead, bent into the leaves of the trees, and were curved inward and aligned side-by-side, consecutively, like the ribcage of some great creature.

"Yes, there was a ship here, all right," Zim deduced. He angled his wrist module about, trying to triangulate the exact coordinates of the blinking signal. "Must have crash-landed ages ago."

"Who were they?"

The alien paused over a particular patch of yellow grass, fiddled with a few buttons, and nodded. "If we're lucky, we can uncover their records and find out. The signal's strongest here; ready for some digging?"

"For some… huh?"

From… somewhere, a shovel materialized and was flung onto the ground at Dib's feet. The boy stepped back in surprise and eyed it skeptically.

"Well?! Don't just stand there, pig-monkey! You evolved arms for a reason, didn't you!?"

* * *

Dib hadn't realized how muggy and sweltering the air was until now. He blinked sweat from his eyes, and smelled the dank odor of upturned soil where he stood. Muck from the digging covered him up to his knees and he panted as he launched another searing, exhausted plunge of the shovel's blade into the ground. Mosquitoes―or something like them―flocked to his neck to take eager bites from his sopping, unprotected flesh, so with every other scoop of dirt, he had to pause and swat them away. He could swear he could hear them snickering.

The boy gained the sense to look around himself and see that he was now deep in the ground, having tunneled a solid six feet down. He wincingly glanced up into the burning sky, far up and beyond the dark pit he'd dug himself into.

"Hey, Zim? Don't you think it's time for us to switch?"

Zim, who had since settled into a beach chair and suckled on an ice-cold soda, hollered back down into the pit, "Why? You're doing such a great job!"

"I've been digging for… Hours maybe? And I'm getting kinda dizzy―"

"That's the dehydration. Hose him down, GIR."

"No, DON'T―"

A funnel of ice-cold water sprayed him in the face, choking him and knocking his glasses into the puddle of mud pooling at his feet. He coughed and sputtered and hollered, all while the robot giggled at his misfortune.

The hosing ceased, and he fumbled for his glasses. That's when he felt his foot hit something hard. He shook the globs of mud from his frames, pulled them onto his head, and could see, through the haze of muck, an object's edge glinting in the brown puddle. He mistook it for the shovel's head at first, but then he reached into the filth and gave it a preliminary tug.

The human cried out in discovery. "H-hey! I think I found something!"

With Zim peering down over his efforts, the boy heaved and yanked at the metallic rim. It was wedged deep into the earth, and for all Dib knew, it could be attached or even welded to a much larger construct that would be impossible to dislodge with human force. But a few more pulls made the stubborn rim wobble a little, giving promise to freedom. He reached for the further edge of the rim with each pull, as if working a coin out of a rusted slot, and felt the power of the mud's suction make a mockery of his struggle, but at last, with a slimy slurp and pop, it came free and slid out before his feet.

It was a little larger than a manhole cover, but much lighter in weight. In fact, despite being a noodle-armed child, Dib could, without too much trouble, hoist it onto its rim and roll it over the dirt to get a better look at it. The surface was caked in clay and rust, so whatever design had been etched into it was now indecipherable. It appeared lumpy, sturdy, and alien-made.

"What is it?" Zim demanded from above.

"Isn't it Irken tech? You tell _ me_."

"Well, quickly! Bring it up here!"

Panting and wriggling against the wall of slick mud, Dib made a few failed attempts until at last, he hoisted the disc free and onto the solid ground at Zim's feet. The metal thumped on the grassy clearing and the alien bleated in excitement.

"Yes, yes, YES~! This is EXACTLY what we need!" Zim lifted it, gave it a quick examination, and clapped a claw onto a tiny, blinking light soldered into the disc's surface. "This AI plate was transmitting that distress signal. Whoever was sending it out is long doomed, but the plate should still function."

Dib rested his elbows on the pit's edge, too exhausted to make the final heave to escape the hole he had dug. He looked quizzically over at the artifact. "There's… a computer on it? There's no way it still runs."

"Never underestimate Irken technical ingenuity! GIR! Come here!"

The robot, disappointed that its water-play had to be interrupted, trotted over.

"You're backwards compatible aren't you?"

"I can sing the alphabet backwards."

"…I choose to take that as a yes." Zim wrenched its metallic skull-cap open. "Move your brain over; we're plugging this in."

GIR happily plopped down onto the grass and allowed Zim to rummage through. The alien muttered to himself and fished cables around.

"Having some intelligence in you will be a nice change of pace," he continued. "Anyway, once I get this running, we should be able to access any memory files leftover from the ship's AI…"

Zim clipped one, two, three black wires together. Weak sparks flew as the robot's brain became ensnared with the ancient device.

Dib, watching, furrowed his brow. "Are you sure this'll work?"

Then, to prove Dib's skepticism wrong, GIR's body shuddered―thrashed―and sprang up onto its feet like a startled animal.

* * *

Something about the robot's movement made the two of them leap and retreat. Zim squeaked in an undignified way and scrambled up a tree stump, where he feigned bravery by gripping the blaster at his side; Dib ducked behind another tree and peered cautiously over his shoulder.

There, in the quiet of the jungle clearing, GIR's body stood in pause. Its eyes lacked the blue gaze--the lights had fizzled out and were left eerily blank. After a few moments, the robot body turned about in a blind whirl, its eyes dark, and a crackling voice emerged from its mouth. It was not the voice either of them expected; it wasn't the squeaky falsetto or lisping trill, but a nasal, dry, deep baritone, like a plump, well-aged man in his fifties, which clashed with the diminutive form of the SIR unit and made its disorientation almost comical. 

"Wha―? What's happened? Oh, _ o-oh_! I feel peculiar."

The two of them steeled their nerves.

"O-o-oh. Oh my." The robot slumped onto its knees, and after a few moments, it pawed its tiny metallic hands on the sod. "What… where…?"

"What's it doing?" Dib hissed.

His voice caused the robot to jerk upward and fizzle in alarm. It groped blindly about. "H-hello? Who's there? My camera system is down, I―can't see a thing. Hello?" It stepped too far from the plate and jerked itself on the leash of cables; surprised, it turned around and tugged on the cords sticking out from its cranium. "What on…?"

"Zim, maybe you should talk to it?"

"Erm.. Yes... AHEM. Computer! You will identify yourself now!!"

"Who am I talking to?" The robot anxiously pried at its non functioning eye sockets. "I-I'm sorry, I don't recognize your voice at all."

"I am an Irken; it matters not who I am! Now! Identify yourself!"

"A... what? I...! I think you ought to identify yourself," the robot countered hotly. The more its anger grew, the more pretentious and puffy it sounded. "Having woken me up in such a horrid state―and, ugh, what kind of useless tin can have you put me in?"

"Computer! You will quit WHINING and DO AS YOU'RE COMMANDED! I demand that you identify yourself!"

"WELL I THINK YOU ARE VERY RUDE AND I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION!"

Dib poked his head out and saw the two stubborn beings screeching at each other. He decided nothing would get done if he didn't intervene, so he moved out into the clearing and began to approach the combative robot.

"Alright! Listen! We just... have some questions! We're not here to argue."

Snootily, the robot thumped back into a seated position and trained its visionless gaze on Dib, monitoring his voice. "I will GLADLY help you the moment I know to whom I am speaking!"

"I'm Dib."

Zim hissed furiously at him. "Don't TELL IT anything!"

But Dib read Zim's paranoia as ridiculous and ignored him. He took several nervous steps forward, and leaned closer to explain, in an assuaging voice, "I'm a human. From Earth."

"Hu-man…? Earth…?"

"And that guy over there--the screaming one--that's Zim," Dib continued. "He's an Irken, from Irk."

"Ir… Ken…"

"But, aren't you Irken? Like, a computer from an Irken ship?"

The robot opened its maw and, rather than words, released a tremendous, painful whirr, like a glitch had lodged in its throat and wouldn't dislodge. The horrifying squeal of corrupted data ceased after a few moments, though, and GIR's body shuddered once again. The program announced: "My name is PU_Delta_Admin_Src-1.3.2b." It heard the unimpressed silence from the two of them. "Oh, but… I just know I had a nickname, too, but… I'm sorry, I can't seem to remember. Dib and Zim. How did you find me?"

"You were sending out a distress signal."

"Oh?" The robot wriggled about thoughtfully. "Strange… No, I can't tell what it was for. Ah, well. I'll assist you if I can, regardless. That is one of my functions... I think. Now, I don't mean to trouble the two of you, kind sirs, but it seems this body's visual cortex is not properly connected. Is there any way to fix that? So that I might see you?"

At least it was speaking politely now; Dib looked past his shoulder and motioned for Zim's help.

"What? Oh. Hnngh. Fine." Zim plodded unhappily across the mossy ground and seized the rattling can of GIR's skull. He gave the interior cables an indelicate yank and released the robot to collapse onto the ground.

Its eyes flickered and dimmed as its found its footing, then brightened with a piercing violet hue. The robot jerked and glanced about the area, past their bodies, and looked more puzzled than relieved. "Oh, oh… Well… Erm, now you're a fuzzy mess of pixels, I'm afraid. My optical codec doesn't seem compatible with this… this contraption." It squinted about. "Say, this will be much easier if you plug me back into my own system. Do you see the console in front of you?"

"Uh…" Dib gave Zim a confirming look. "No."

The voice scoffed, like it thought he was joking around. "Oh, come now; I'm the blind one, not you! It's a large table, against the northernmost wall, that way. It has a whole series of buttons and blinking lights and all that."

Dib and Zim, glanced over their shoulders to search for any sign of a broken down console. Instead, they saw only dirt, rust, and grass, open to the elements on every side. The thick jungle around them buzzed with insect life; the metal ribs of whatever structure used to stand there spread out in a barren, silent row.

"There's nothing here," Zim answered forcefully, and a little bit rudely, all things considered.

"Yeah, um…" Dib cut in with more diplomacy. "I hate to break it to you, but whatever was here? It's long gone."

"Hmm? What?" The voice quieted, then erupted with even more insistence. "No, no, that's not right. Look around. I must have been dislocated from the ship somehow. There's a shipwreck nearby; it has all my equipment. Can you boys get me there?"

"This is a shipwreck," Zim said. "It's in ruins, and we dug your useless circuit board out from under it!"

Zim's explanation only seemed to agitate the voice further, like it didn't appreciate being contradicted. It huffed and blustered, its stuffy accent only seeming to swell. "Well, well―no, this is ridiculous. I, I must have been out for a few days, so I must have slid a little ways off―"

A beep sounded, and a red light flashed over the rusted artifact plate. Dib and the artificial intelligence jumped in surprise, but Zim coolly pulled up his wrist module, closed the scanning laser screen, and read the output data. "Five thousand years."

The robot screwed its purple eyes intently. "Hmm?"

"I just carbon dated you. That's how long you've been buried."

"Wh-what? You said―_ five thousand _―! That's just not―"

"Why was this Irken vessel deployed to this sector? What happened to the crew?"

"I… don't…"

"What was the name of the captain? What was their mission?" Zim endured the robot's silence only a second more, and demanded in increasing aggravation, "Do you know ANYTHING of ANY USE AT ALL?!?"

The robot turned its head back and forth, rocked its shoulders, then looked weakly up at the two of them, pathetically murmuring, "If… If we could only find… my console, then surely…"

"Great! His memory circuits are fried." Zim harrumphed and sneered. "This trip was useless. Guess it's back in the hole."

"Wh-what?"

Dib, surprised by the cruel turn, lifted his hands. "Woah, Zim, don't you think we should--"

"WHAT ARE YOU SNIVELLING ABOUT, BOY! If a computer doesn't work, it's JUNK!"

"Hey! Come on! We just dug up an _ ancient alien intelligence _ and you want to chuck it?"

"It isn't alien to _ me,_" Zim countered.

"It's still _ old_! And _ mysterious_! And kinda cool!"

"Only a savage, primate brain such as yours could look upon a rusty piece of shrapnel like that and declare it '_cool_.'"

"Let's keep it!"

"NO! We're dumping it!"

"Erm…"

The two of them squawked a few more disagreements and threats, foreheads pinned in ram-butting form.

"Ex… Excuse me? I don't mean to interrupt your debate over my unspeakable demise, but…" The robot squeezed between the squabblers. "What were you hoping to find, exactly? If my repair request signal has been circulating unanswered for… _ five thousand years_, then you must be out of your way."

"We're on a mission," Dib answered, giving far more weight to their quest than it merited so far. "To find out… Stuff."

"Important stuff," Zim echoed.

"Mostly about Irken history? Which I guess you can't remember?"

After a moment of humming electricity, the robot tentatively admitted, "It sounds familiar.... And unpleasant… Where does your mission take you? I might have some uncorrupted field guides tucked away in my circuitry."

Dib didn't have high hopes, but he also didn't wish to give up such a precious chance at handling a mysterious, talking artifact. "We were heading to Sloo."

* * *

It was like a thunderstorm burst from the belly of the rust-caked disc: a rumble, a whip-crack, blinding light, and surge of violent energy traveling in a snarling bolt. The purple lightning threaded through the cables and, upon meeting GIR's cranium, erupted into a tiny but powerful repulsion force, knocking both alien and human onto their backs.

The sound and force startled them as much as it knocked the wind out of them, so it took several seconds of writhing in the patchy dirt before either of them found the strength to moan and sit up. Dib did so first, cradling his aching head with a hand and struggling to peer through his crooked eyeglasses.

"Ugh… _ Ow_. What was that?"

When he fixed his glasses, he found GIR, still purple-eyed and buzzing with the deep voice of the intelligence, staggering in shock. Steam poured from its agape mouth.

"Sloo!" it cried. Its voice grew despondent and terrified. "I remember Sloo! Oh, oh, the HORROR! SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS THERE! But, OOOH, sirs, you must take me there at once!"

Zim hopped back up onto his feet and poked a claw rudely into the robot's forehead. "So NOW you remember something? How very convenient."

"This is no ploy! Hearing that name just now fired off my neuron-cells! My template is functional!"

"I don't really know what you're talking about," Dib said, "but what's on Sloo that's so terrible? Is it still there?"

"After five thousand years? Impossible!" It paused. "Mostly improbable." Pause again. "Most likely not… Maybe… If we're lucky… Uhh… LOOK HERE! I don't exactly _ know _what 'it' was! But my organic original sure left there in a hurry! He must have crash-landed on this moon in a desperate escape…"

"Organic… original…?"

"Yes, yes, I do remember! My original had a research base there, so surely, there will be more equipment… Perhaps enough data files to trigger a cascade, so that I can self-repair…!"

"You're a personality upload," Zim declared. "Why didn't you mention this before?!"

"I didn't? Must have slipped my mind."

"Wait." The gears were turning wildly in Dib's head; he felt his vision spinning from all the excitement. His chest swelled with surprise and anticipation―it couldn't be, it _ couldn't _ be. "You came from Sloo―and you landed _ here_."

"Hmm, yes, that seems to be the size of it."

Before the tiny, possessed body of a robot that normally tormented him, Dib dropped to his knees and flung the heft of his mysterious book out onto the ground. He gripped it only to shove it into the eyesight of the upload. "Th-this!" His voice came out strangled with exertion. "Did you WRITE this!?"

For a long, pregnant pause, the robot's eyes lingered on the cover of the book.

Dib thought his heart might leap out of his ribcage; he sucked in a breath.

"...Er… I can't _ see _ anything, you know. But my original did author many books. He was a prolific writer in the field of artificial intelligence, bioprogramming, and augmented cybernetics."

The boy dropped the book and blurted, "Oh my god. You _ are _ him! You're him! You're this Von'nen guy!"

"Von'nen?" The name whirred in its circuitry. The intelligence coughed. "Well, sort of. I'm a respectable copy, anyway."

"THAT'S INSANE! I have so many questions! I've been reading this book and I'm investigating stuff and DID YOU INVENT PAK'S, what were you researching―!?"

Just as Dib started to get into its personal space, the robot, sensing his encroachment, backed away nervously. "I'm glad that we've found grounds for cooperation, and that you're… erm… enthusiastic. But let's focus on fixing me first, yes? I'm sure I'll be better suited for interrogation once I'm repaired."

"I'm sorry," Zim blurted, inserting himself into the fray and pointing rudely, "you don't find this fishy? He doesn't even SOUND Irken!" 

Dib, fairly, asked, "What do Irkens sound like?"

"I―it just doesn't sound right! Computer, say something in Irken!"

The robot screwed its purple eyes tight and mulled, "Is that a language?"

"SEE?"

"He's broken, Zim. Once we fix him, I'm sure he can speak whatever horrible alien-speak you want." Dib moved to the entangled, strobing disc and rolled it up onto its side. Moving it to the ship would take some delicate, complicated maneuvering, so he tucked it best he could under his arm and avoided tangling himself in the attached cables. A thought occurred to him, and it bothered him enough to voice aloud, "Actually… What language are you speaking now? How can I understand you? Why have I been able to talk to every alien I've met so far?? That doesn't make sense."

"Foolish Dib! All aliens speak English! I definitely didn't stick an auto-translator into the back of your skull when you weren't looking!"

"What?"

"What?"

Just as Dib started a worried groping about his head, Zim cleared his throat.

"FINE, WHATEVER!" Zim stalked over to the possessed form of his SIR unit, and in a rare display of cooperation, began to carry it in tandem with Dib. "I've got my eye on you, computer. I've known enough AI's to know not to trust them so easily. We'll go to Sloo. But I'm not running a taxi service for defunct personality uploads!! You can expect it to be your last stop!"

* * *

As Reklo disappeared behind them on their last leap for Sloo, Zim burned in silence.

Though he was initially distracted by the upsetting consequence of his relenting―that this suspicious character, still stuffed in GIR's brain, settled in the back-seat as another passenger―he paused to question why watching the moon made in his rear-view felt so much like an… echo of something. He suppressed this nonsensical emotion at once, but then came more contradictions while he flew the Voot toward their next destination.

Two, bizarre feelings knotted into one:

First, he felt a peculiar longing for the company of his SIR unit. He usually felt relief at being spared the robot's antics, even for a little while, but this… usurper had come, possessing GIR's form, shoving him aside… Yes, Zim had done the transfer himself, and now he was beginning to regret it. He should have left that disc to rot. He should have left it alone.

Second, he felt a nagging sensation, one he did not fully understand, that surged everytime he glanced over his shoulder and noticed the boy and the intelligence chattering in secret, sharing, gossiping, explaining. It irritated him. 

Dib was supposed to be _ Zim's _ally. That was the word the human boy used― "ally"--wasn't it? When they agreed to this madness at the start?

And now this intelligence appears and… interrupts. A wedge.

Zim had no solid evidence, but the more he let his thoughts ruminate on it, the more certain he became. That thing was trouble.


	7. The Cascade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zim and Dib go to Sloo, and find not *quite* the answers they're looking for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup I'm still alive eyyyyyy
> 
> How was your year? Mine was fine but also sucked! But I decided to dive into writing again to ease my boredom. Hope you enjoy as plot happens!

If Dib knew he'd be visiting not one, not two, but _ three _ interplanetary locations today, he would have brought more film, or at least another memory card. As it was, he was close to filling up his video camera with footage he'd taken surreptitiously between arguments, or while Zim was piloting and not paying any attention. Footage of sweeping planetary landscapes, ethereal plumes of stars, rocky ridges of asteroid belts. He would linger the aim of his lens on breathtaking spectacle and imagine, pine, for the someday when he might release such footage into the world and be recognized for his role as humanity's first intergalactic traveler.

Ah, it was easy, falling back into old habits.

"Dib," the robot said (the intelligence had learned his name quickly, what a relief to be addressed properly). "You've gone quiet. What are you doing?"

"I'm―" Dib swooped the clunky face of the camera away from the windshield, away from the back of Zim's head, and focused on the violet-hue of the possessed SIR unit. The cables sticking out of the robot's cranium had been tangled into a corner and left it rather pinned against the wall, like a fly in a spiderweb. Once Dib centered his camera view, he adjusted his zoom. "I'm just vlogging."

"...Vlogg-ing?"

"Video log; I figured I'd make a recording. Y'know, for research."

"Oh, you're a researcher? Fascinating! What is your field of specialty, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Uh." Dib dropped the camera and fidgeted. He tried to think of something convincing and not entirely embarrassing. Actually, how does one explain alien-hunting to… well, an alien? "It's just a hobby," he answered, proverbially dragging his feet. He winced at his lack of self-respect. "But, I document… unknown species? I guess?"

"Zoography! A noble profession. My organic original dabbled in that; he wrote books on the subject."

Dib stepped aside to view the binder resting on the floor. With nothing left to record, he hoisted the camera upright, centered the view once again on the robot, and pressed record. "Do you know stuff? About the people you researched on Sloo?"

Not noticing that it was now a feature of a mini-clip, the intelligence hummed. "The people…? On Sloo…? I'm not sure. But then again, _ I _didn't do the research."

"But―you wrote this book."

"I am--more or less--a duplication of Von'nen's consciousness, it's true, but I am not him." The computer program pondered the predicament. "You may call me Von'Ai, as shorthand. Yes… I remember that, now―that was a nickname given to me long ago. That will remove confusion, no?"

"Von… 'AI'… Oh, I get it. Okay!" Dib flightily pondered the ethics of recording the intelligence without permission. He didn't think it would mind a feature role, so he assuaged his conscience by saying, "So, Von'Ai. How about an interview? To catch our viewers up to speed."

"Viewers?"

"Er… Me. Me, up to speed."

"Well, as I'm sure you know, nothing has changed since we've set course for Sloo."

"Yeah! But… you're looking for data files, right? It's been a long time; are you sure we'll find them?"

"I don't need to recover _ all _the data; that's the beauty of it. I only need enough to trigger a neural cascade."

"And… What's that?"

Animated by the boy's questioning, the robot stirred upright. "Good question! Let me give you an example. Have you ever smelled something, and that alone transported you to a memory long forgotten, in full detail?"

Dib wished he could think of a pleasant example, but he could only think of chocolate, and how its smell triggered anxiety attacks thanks to Clembrane's antics. "Urgh. Yes."

"That's a cascade. One neuron connection fires off, leading to another, then another, until a chain reaction activates the entire network. It's how your brain recovers suppressed or forgotten memories, and it's how I will repair the degeneration in my own network."

"Huh."

"Dib." Its voice wavered a moment. "May I ask what _ you _ hope to find on Sloo? Are you looking to research there?"

"What? No. I―" In a nervous, jumpy fidget, Dib shut his camcorder. "I'm just… It's Zim who needs the…"

"Oh! I see; you're helping a friend. No explanation necessary."

"Woah, NO!" Dib leaped forward in a corrective fury. "We are _ not _ friends."

"Business associates?"

"HE TRIED TO DESTROY MY PLANET!"

A clang of metal interrupted them, which proved to be the Irken's fist on mental; Zim screeched from behind the control seat. "YOU WILL CEASE THIS INCESSANT NOISE-MAKING! I can't focus with all your BLABBERING!"

Dib attempted a haughty retort, but Zim easily knocked him aside by jerking the ship to and fro, causing him to juggle against the walls of the hull. At last, Dib felt his stomach squash against a pipe and he clung to it for dear life as the tossing and turning eased. Once the rocking ended, Dib found himself upside-down and staring back at a very puzzled robot.

"That Zim is a strange fellow," Von'Ai intoned, as if the Irken couldn't hear him. "Very angry."

"Yeah." The boy wheezed and slipped down to the floor again. "But you don't seem like him at all. Which is kinda weird, now that I think about it?"

"What do you mean by―"

"ALRIGHT, WORMS!" Zim, the great interruptor, inserted himself once again, this time physically. He posed and brayed, "We've breached the system. We'll be at Sloo any minute. Now, computer, I HOPE you have some sort of _ map _ that will direct us to your supposed 'lab'! Unless you expect us to scan the entire planet!"

"A map…? A map! Er, yes, I think I…" The eyes flickered with thought. "Hmm. This robot has a projection feature. Interesting! Yes, I think I can pull it up…"

A beam of amber light filtered from the SIR unit's eye sockets and formed a faint hologram on the floor of the ship. Zim and Dib stood over it with critical gazes.

"There! How's that!"  
"It's a pig," Zim observed, voice flat and unsurprised.

"...Oh? Er… Hold on…" The hologram blipped, whirred, and reformed. "How about now?"

"Now it's a hamster," Dib said.

"My! I'm sorry… It seems this… Unit has a slight preoccupation with… Rotund animals… Erm… One more time…"

At last, the planet appeared.

The hologram expanded outward, like an inflating balloon, until it nearly encompassed the entire cabin; threads of golden light swirled and hummed, drifting between Dib's fingers when they came too close. The complexity of the picture only seemed to advance as its size grew, with topological features demonstrated by rippling shapes. Oceans, mountains, valleys, rivers looping into continents.

"Here."

A red blinking beacon erupted from the northern hemisphere.

"The research facility was located in the savannahs of the northern continent, next to a vast swamp and near a mountain range separating it from its neighboring desert… I don't anticipate any security features giving us a problem; Von'nen was the sole researcher on the planet, and the indigenous peoples were friendly."

Dib reminded him, though he loathed to do it: "Didn't you say something horrible was here?"

"Uhh… Yes… But as I said, it's probably gone now. You might do a scan just to be sure."

Zim gestured rudely with his claws in mid-air, employing the Earth-habit of air-quotes. "Yeeeah, I'll just do a 'bad stuff' scan. What are you even talking about!!"

"I can do without sarcasm," Von'Ai complained. His voice finally breached into irritation. "You should scan for missile silos. At minimum, we can avoid being evaporated upon entry."

"You think you're SO-O-O smart, don't you?!"

"_ Where _ is this hostility coming from? You clearly suffer from MASSIVE insecurity!"

The argument carried on for some time after that; Dib thought about intervening, but the stars outside were so compelling, and the burning surface of the galaxy's star so bright, that he instead tuned out the noise and watched as a distant planet, the size and delicacy of a pearl, emerged from the inky void.

* * *

The spot where the Voot landed rippled with golden light; the field of yellow grasses billowed under the strain of the ship's engine.

They emerged crankily but with clear purpose, the robot toddling along with its intelligence plate balanced upon its head like an oversized sombrero (GIR, Dib pondered, would have appreciated that immensely), and Zim muttering while poking at his wrist module. Dib, the only one admiring the scenery, took the first step into the grass.

Before them, a massive field stretched endlessly on all sides, almost barren of any signs of life. Dib caught sight of a flock of--something?--fluttering away at the horizon, but aside from these shadows, he saw only the occasional silhouette of a lonely tree leaning its weight over the savannah, like old men pausing to take a rest. Considering how much the landscape reminded Dib of African geography―he half expected to see alien versions of giraffes and lions roaming about―the air had a surprising coolness to it, fresh and silky on his skin, that felt like the first winds before rain. The sky overhead bore no ominous clouds, though, and the breeze merely fluttered a lazy path over the thick, knee-height grass at his feet. It was unlike the grass on Earth, that prickly, scratchy, annoying turf; walking on this felt like walking on cotton clouds; it had a fluffiness and density that gave it the texture of rabbit fur. Dib found himself passing his hands through it and wondering if he one could make the world's most comfortable pillows out of it.

"What ARE you doing?!"

Dib, startled by Zim's voice, froze with his hand steeped in the grass.

"If you would cease fondling to flora," Zim snapped, "we can get to the business at hand." The Irken turned his wrath on the robot by stomping over to it and knocking it off-balance. "Well, computer. We're in the middle of an empty field and I don't see any sign of this 'base' of yours. So is your memory faulty or is this another trick?"

"No trick," Von'Ai declared, sounding unperturbed. His form wobbled slightly, but he steadied and stood firm. "In fact, we needn't go far. The easiest entrance is a short hike from here."

Zim made a scoffing noise but thankfully did not argue any more.

Von'Ai hadn't lied in saying the walk would be short; they trekked for several minutes through the soft turf, and before the Voot could disappear behind them, the robot stopped them under the shade of a native, purple-barked tree. On the cleared patch of dirt beneath their feet, rainbow colors fractaled through the delicate, crystalline leaves overhead.

With so much new and strange, Dib was thoroughly distracted, but Von'Ai checked his coordinates and declared, "Here."

"Here?" The impatience in Zim's voice grew.

"Yes, here."

"...Here, what?? All I see is this hideous plant!"

"Correct." Von'Ai paused as the lights in his eyes whirred. "Now, jump."

"JUMP?"

"That's what I said."

Neither of them knew what to make of the command. They looked up and only saw branches sagging under their own weight, just out of reach.

"What are we jumping for?" Dib asked. "I don't see anything―"

"Oh, where's your sense of adventure?" Von'Ai teased. He appeared to be enjoying their befuddlement. "Why not jump and see where it takes you?"

"ENOUGH OF THIS! Zim did not come all this way to―"

"Ready, boys? Follow my lead. Three, two…"

"Zim will NOT―"

"One!"

Dib did it, while Zim continued to squawk petulantly.

Thankfully, that was all that was needed.

* * *

The ground buckled underneath them; the sandy soil tremored and folded in, at first sucking their ankles down into it, then dumping them unceremoniously into a hollow pit below. The initial falling did not take long, as their feet landed on a cliff's edge maybe a few feet down, but with the force of dirt pouring over them, the alien and human alike were shoved hurling into the deeper tunnel passageway, choking, coughing, and rolling in a terrible fit until, at last, they hit the cave floor along with a hefty pile of deposited earth.

Dib managed to drag himself out of the sand pile first, shaking dust from his pant legs and jacket. The cave before them, he realized upon adjusting his glasses, was wide but too dark to see into, just a massive maw of black, mildew-tainted air. He squinted upward to see, roughly two stories up, the hole they had fallen through with light trickling through.

Zim, cursing and stuck waist-deep in a sand dune, tried in vain to push himself out. At least neither of them looked to be hurt, Dib thought, though the fall had sent them worryingly far from any kind of exit.

Dib almost forgot about the robot until he spotted it sliding feet-first and without a care down the collapsed cleft of dirt, landing ably on the bottom floor, upright and unperturbed. 

"I trust we're all in one piece?" Von'Ai asked.

Zim paused his wriggling and scowled at it with deathly hatred.

"What is this place?" Dib found his vision adjusting to the blackness. He could make out patterns in the rock wall, textures―ridges and carvings that looked distinctly artificial. The floors under their feet were not paved, but scuffed with the shuffling of countless feet, and faded color could be made out over the nearby passageway, engraved in the rock.

"The base we're looking for is embedded in the Qway underground colony. This is the southern entrance―we'll need to make our way north."

After squinting as far as he could into the whale-mouth tunnel, Dib felt a twinge of trepidation. "Do you think… maybe that _ horrible thing _ might be down here?"

"It's surely possible!" The robot had already toddled several yards ahead, oblivious to the darkness. "Come on, then! No time to waste!"

* * *

They walked.

The air was musty and warm throughout the tunnels, the earth hard and cold under their feet, and the black passageways branched off in numerous and puzzling directions, but once Von'Ai turned on the robot's headlights and led the way, he claimed confidence in knowing where to go. The deeper they ventured into the tunnels, the stranger things looked: the dilapidated structures of old buildings cluttered the passages like desiccated faces, sagging and crumbling; the surface of the walls glistened, and upon closer examination was found to be coated in a petrified, waxy material. It seemed organic.

Dib could not shake the eeriness of it. With almost thirty minutes of silent exploration, all they'd discovered were the ramshackle remains, tombs of some unknown race. The farther they went, the more unbelievable it felt that this place could be so enormous and yet so very empty. With every flickering shadow, with every trick of light, he would forget, and swear he'd seen some figure in the dark―and he would be consumed with a hope, a terror, a delight, that some long-lost group of hardy survivors had made it after all. Yet at every turn, he found more stone, more silence. The lack of life proved more unnerving than the possibility of monsters.

Dib trailed his gaze over to Zim, who had gone unnaturally quiet. By the expression on the Irken's face and its dull pace, the boy guessed this was a symptom of boredom, not awe. Unable to put up with it any longer, the human piped up with a benign, obvious statement: "This place is _ huge_."

"Mmm, yes." The robot tapped its toes along the stone path still, its alighted eyes beaming across the ghostly walls. "It was a sizable colony; the largest on the planet. These tunnels accommodated a bit fewer than a million residents, so we will be passing a whole manner of chambers… Residence chambers most of them, but there will be storage, food halls, trading posts, armories, breweries, burial grounds, hospitals… Anything you'd expect to find in a small city."

"A 'city,'" Zim harrumphed. "Pah. Piles of sticks and stones. Pathetic."

"Their technology was admittedly undeveloped, but you needn't be rude. All civilizations were once primitive, including ours."

"NOT true! The Irken race has always been glorious! We were BORN advanced!"

The baffling illogic of Zim's pronouncement led to stony silence rather than more argument. Von'Ai, it seemed, had slowly grown wise to Zim's antics.

"I can hardly believe this place is empty after only a few thousands years," Von'Ai mused. "It's truly a shame. The Qway were a vigorous and lively people. Do you know what became of them?"

"No idea. It's like they just vanished without a trace."

Zim merely grunted, signalling passive agreement.

They must have passed twenty or thirty passages before crossing a hill of dusty limestone. They had to duck under a low, dripping wall of stalactites to find a huge cavern drenched in blue and green glow. The air suddenly cooled and stank of sulfurous waters, with a faint mist pooling along a large, running chasm of an underground river. They had to trek over slippery stones and through the bubbling brook to wind down the decline and toward the opposite exit, and it was in the valley that they found a most fascinating set of sights.

While the previous tunnels contained only fossils and decay, this room burst with peculiar life; patches of fluorescent fungi and microorganisms resting and pulsing on the sides of moist stone, dangling glow-worms from the ceiling, mushrooms and wriggling, writhing siphonophores rooted in the cave fractures. The multicolor, crowded frenzy of competing, cooperating, and twinkling life-forms reminded Dib of a coral reef, for at every turn he encountered some new, growing thing bubbling in the dark. The beauty overcame any healthy wariness. In fact, he found himself rather rudely poking at everything, just to see the petals rankle, the tentacles recoil, the gelatinous flesh jiggle under his finger-jab.

Zim bumped into him several times, barking in frustration every time he paused and shoving him when he didn't move fast enough.

The boy stumbled and sucked his teeth, but scurried ahead when he caught sight of a network of stillwater pools surrounded by wreaths of glowing flora. He stepped over the tender, yielding plant life and stood at the rim of one. The ceiling pulsed with an eerie blue light, but the pool seemed bottomless, vast and silent and filled with a deep blackness that could have swallowed him up. Across the surface of each pool, bright green clusters of what appeared to be fluorescent algae drifted along, like chains of Christmas lights in a winter's night. Their beauty intoxicated him; without thinking, Dib wrested an arm over the rocky rim and dipped his hand in. The waters were warm and inviting, and dark, and his hand all but disappeared in its murk except for the dancing neon particles that began to swirl in his palm.

"Woah…"

A green luminescent plume, shaped like a firework burst, slipped over his skin and away into the rippling dim.

Von'Ai spoke up, the eye beams tracking blindly along the stalactites above. "What chamber have we reached now? I lost our orientation."

"Who knows?" Zim said. "It's a room with a bunch of smelly puddles and rank weeds."

"Ahh, then, you found the breeding pools! Good to know they're still intact after all these years."

Dib repeated dumbly, "Breeding… pools…"

"Yes, for the Qway's reproductive cycle. Mating, egg-laying―"

"Oh, EW!" Dib flung the goop from his hand and wiped his fingers anxiously into the grit on the cave floor. "C-c'mon! Couldn't have said something BEFORE I put my hand in there!?"

"Foolish Dib," Zim crowed. "Sticking your dumb face in things from other planets is a good way to get eggs in your stomach."

Von'Ai chided, "Oh, please. There's no danger whatsoever. But watch your step! There's plenty of genetic material around."

It wasn't hard to spot the old base in question. They exited the glowing chamber, entered another bleak and empty hall, then came face-to-face with what could only be described as a vault door. Huge, round, iron, rusted, and bolted into the rock, blocking off some secret. Small etchings in the metal, worn from age, clearly designated the door as Irken technology, which meant Zim held unwarranted confidence in opening it.

"Step aside. This should be simple for an Irken elite."

If 'simple' meant agitating a long-since broken keypad, kicking at the hinges, and wedging himself into a narrow slot and getting stuck there, then sure.

But Dib, eventually tiring of Zim's expertise, began investigating the door himself; he noticed that a circular, complete seam around the slot had considerable oxidation and wear. Upon pressing against the plate with his fingers, he felt it shudder and crack with give.

"What are you doing?" Zim, still squeezing and huffing his gut through the hole, kicked his legs frantically. "Don't touch ANYTHING! This technology is FAR too delicate and advanced for y―"

Dib, as he usually did, ignored him. His hand planted on the metal plate and shoved hard, and the entire circle of metal, with Zim still wedged in the slot at its center, cracked and plummeted forward into the darkness. He also proceeded to ignore Zim's foul stream of curses, instead turning to scoop the possessed robot into his arms and step through the hold he'd created.

The robot's flashlight eyes scanned the room, past the wriggling, kicking legs of a trapped Zim and onto the mechanical, worn walls. The deterioration was so great, that Dib could no longer tell what color this base's interior had once been; in every direction within the expansive cavern of ancient metal, the surfaces were subsumed with reddish dust, moss, and fungi. The ground cracked and crunched where he walked, and when he looked down to find out why, he found the floor littered with a layer of broken shards of glass, glistening in the dark like powder snow.

"Ah, I wish I could see it," Von'Ai said wistfully. "Lots of memories in this place."

Dib cast a light over to the left, and found the smashed remains of upright tubes with liquid fermenting inside. Rotted cables tangled the floor, metal innards exposed and calcified. "What kind of… research was he doing, exactly?"

(Zim, a few yards away, finally succeeded in yanking his torso free and plodded over, grumbling).

"Sociological research, mostly. But he would have been studying Qway bio-physiology as well. It was some… project of extreme importance."

"What could POSSIBLY be important about THIS wasteland?"

Both Dib and Von'Ai pretended not to hear.

"So, what do we need?" Dib asked.

"Do you see the control console? There should be a large display screen."

"--_ Hey! Did you hear what I said! _"

"Okay, I'm there." Dib tapped his fingers on a keypad, but of course nothing happened. "Is there a button or a power source or something?"

"We need a boot cartridge. Should be lying about somewhere."

"--_ Why aren't either of you listening to Zim! Zim is important! Zim demands to be _―"

Dib eyed the floor and found something; he plucked a slab of hollow, book-sized metal and brushed off the excess soil. "This thing?"

"_Hey! Heeeey! Pay attention to me-e-e-e_!"

After passing his fingers across the control console for some time, at last, they slipped into some sort of insertion slot that had the right dimensions. He crammed the cartridge in and awaited some activity to appear on screen. Nothing.

"Hmm." Von'Ai listened intently. "It isn't working?"

"Hold on." Dib yanked it from the plug and puffed a few strong, sharp breaths into the cartridge's socket to clear away dust. After jamming it back in, the monitor sputtered slowly to life. "Ha!"

"Wha…? How did you…?"

Dib tried to stay humble when he answered, "Experience."

A calm, bluish-white light washed over the chamber, accompanied with a pleasant, piano-tone flourish as the screen illuminated. A warm masculine voice hummed over the base's speaker system, which had obviously deteriorated from age but still functioned. "Welcome to the beta trial version of OOS! If you are p-p-p-pleased with your experience so far, please consider upgrading to the full version-n-n so that you may access all of my features-s-zzt."

"Um." With some trepidation, Dib stepped forward. "OOS?"

It clarified, "The Omniscient Organizational System: the only commercially patented artificial intelligence on the market." A slideshow of fuzzy stock images followed: smiling aliens shaking claws, business aliens pointing to whiteboards, trees bathed in sunlight. The tone took on an obnoxious, advertising sort of tone. "I have a variety of helpful tools available. My skills include city planning, economic and market predictions, computer systems efficiency, environmental impact studies, corporate restructuring, diet planning, and political candidate selection. _ Leaders of the many worlds: let me do your thinking for you! _"

"Omniscient… Organizational..." Dib scratched his forehead. "OmniOrg?"

Von'Ai, overhearing, asked, "What's that?"

"It's mentioned in your book. Hey, uh, computer? Did you know Von'nen?"

Impersonally, the screen flickered then answered, "Von'nen Kurtz is the patent holder for this intelligence. He can answer any inquiries about legal usage rights or pricing."

"...Ah." Von'Ai hummed. "Then he constructed this intelligence, too."

"Oh! So, it's like… Your brother, or something?"

"It's a synthetic, constructed intelligence," Von'Ai responded crossly. "_I'm _ a personality upload. We couldn't be further apart."

"Er… Right."

"OOS-Beta," Von'Ai said, "are you capable of scanning this base's internal memory?"

"Why, yes I am." Its voice retreated as if it had stepped into another room to rummage through shelves. "Scanning… Scanning…" It returned to full volume and declared, "I have found thirty-seven uncompromised memory files. Would you like to download them?"

"Only thirty-seven," Von'Ai lamented. He sounded crushed. "That's rather scant, isn't it? But I suppose it will have to do..."

"HEY!" Zim's voice emerged like cymbals crashing; Dib winced at the screeching that blasted into his ear. "Just WHAT do you think you're doing?"

"Zim? You have another complaint?" Von'Ai's simulated voice dipped to almost inaudible levels. "What a surprise."

"You are NOT uploading some funky old junk files into GIR! I demand you get your own memory storage and butt out!"

The violet-eyed robot looked ready to retort, but paused, thought a moment, and then returned with a mellowed tone. It sighed. "Your request is shrill, but fair. I've occupied your unit long enough, and it's high time I find better accommodations. OOS-Beta, are there any memory drives available?"

"_ A bio-electric bonder is in storage and ready for use_."

"Splendid!" Von'Ai nodded. "We will use it."

The computer asked, "_Shall I read out the terms and conditions? _"

Dib couldn't get words out: "Uh."

The computer must have taken that as an affirmative, because a blast of garbled text followed, being read at such speed that a novel's length of conditions breezed by; Dib could only manage to make out some of the computer's last breath:

"--NOTLIABLEFORANYDAMAGESINCLUDINGSTROKEHEADACHECONSTIPATIONHIVES SPONTANEOUSCOMBUSTIONLIMBLOSSPARALYSISPLITPERSONALITYORLIKE, EVERYCANCEREVER, ASUCKERWHOAGREESTOTHESETERMSSAYSWHAT."

"...What?"

_ Bing_! "Thank you! You may now remove the bonder from its patented, fully recyclable packaging. Enjoy!" 

A slot in the console fell open, revealing a small but deep iron chamber. It was too dark to see all the way inside, and too narrow to poke his head in. When Dib searched its interior with his hand, the faded remains of paper packaging crumbled into dust under his fingers, and at the arm's-length bottom of the compartment, he felt the cool, hard, stony surface of some… object. Just feeling it gave him no clue what it could be, but it felt like a cylinder roughly the size of his forearm. He brought it out carefully, its weight surprisingly light, and brought it into the cool light of the display screen.

With a bit of turning it over and poking at it, Dib determined it to be some sort of bracer, made of some indeterminable material that felt like limestone to the touch and had a peculiar pink color to it. A black spherical stone a little larger than a pea sat at the center of one side, surrounded by buttons and slots that he couldn't make sense of. It reminded him somewhat of the wrist module Zim constantly fiddled with.

"What are you waiting for? Go ahead and put it on."

For a moment, Dib experienced a wave of concern and suspicion, which he chose to shove aside. Sure, this looked sketchy… sounded sketchy… and he didn't even know what it was. But for once, he chose to not listen to the nagging, paranoid voice in his head and squeezed his hand through. The stone bracer rested against his skin, its smooth, cool contours sending goosebumps up his arm. He fiddled with it to affix it comfortably about his reedy wrist.

"Once you've got it how you like it, push down on the two triggers on either side of the display lens."

He felt around the black stone and found, indeed, two tiny buttons that he could, with his fingernails, pull together. He did it. A sharp pinch―a needle puncture―lanced the top of his wrist; he jumped and yelped. "OW! WHAT―!" 

"Sorry. Sorry! The bonder _ does _ run on your body's electrical current… Bio-electric as it is... Now, you've just had a microwire conductor inserted, so you won't be able to take it off freely for now. But don't worry! It's quite comfortable."

Dib found, after a few tense breaths and enduring a couple throbs of residual pain, that indeed, the bracer began to hum, its central gem glowing with soft light, and its interior gradually warming to the touch. Soon it reached his body temperature and aside from its firmness and weight, he could hardly feel it.

"Ooh." Dib lifted it to his face and wiggled his fingers to relax the pressed muscles in his arm. "So, does it give me any powers or anything?"

"What? No. In fact, it's quite useless." Von'Ai, thinking it over, amended, "To you, anyway. For me, it will be my mind and eyes."

It took a few minutes of rewiring and configuration to resort Von'Ai and GIR into their rightful places, and Zim reluctantly helped in this endeavor, especially once he tired of seeing Dib's fumbling.

"Give me THAT! You'll break it!"

So it was that the intelligence plate was dismounted, plugged into Dib's bracer, and humming with the sound of upload. When Zim clapped the skull cap back down onto GIR's head, the robot shook to life with its familiar ice-blue eyes.

"GIR!"

The robot stretched, shook its empty skull, and upon seeing its master, stuck out its tongue and did a victorious jig. "I'm-m-m back, babeh!"

Dib, not interested in Zim's robotic reunion, gazed expectantly at the bracer. The faint light inside the central gem pulsed steadily, its intensity growing until it seemed like the small pearl might burst from pressure.

_ Ping! _ Electric feedback steadied the light, and at once, Von'Ai's voice floated softly from his wrist.

"Ah! Now! This is quite nice! Much less… Er… Clutter in here. Now, for the best feature: if you please, you can activate the hologram feature. At last, we can meet face-to-face―simulated, but still!" The black pearl beeped and blinked. "All you need to do is tap the lens and point me to an open space."

"Okay…" Dib tensed and placed his thumb atop the pearl. "Here goes nothing…"

And after a faded flicker of light, the projection of Von'nen's bodily form materialized in the center of the floor, like a haunting spirit.

* * *

"Um."

"How is it? Am I coming through clearly?"

"....Um…"

Von'Ai looked between them and frowned. "What? What is it?"

"There's… something…" Dib prodded the bracelet worriedly. "This doesn't look... right."

"Mm? How so?"

Zim, brow furrowed, traipsed to Dib's side to tug on the device as well. "You must have done something wrong. Let me see!"

"Ow! Stop!"

"Boys? BOYS! Please!" The hologram lifted its hands and begged, "Tell me what's the matter! Perhaps I can…"

Zim pointed in froth-mouthed accusation. "YOU! You are not Irken!"

"I'm… not?"

"You're CLEARLY not!"

* * *

...He clearly wasn't.

The hologram of Von'nen, or what purported to be him, did not display as a squat, green, large-headed creature with antennae and ruby eyes.

It didn't look like that at all.

Instead, what stood before them was a being of modest height, comparable to a grown human, with stately posture and long, narrow limbs. His purple-gray skin appeared leathery, like that of an old man, and had no signs of hair or antennae. He wore a flowing garb unlike anything out of the Empire―a gentle amber-sheen robe tied at his narrow waist with a black sash. And atop his slender form, a pair of yellow goat's eyeballs blinked back at them, poking out from a narrow head crowned with wriggling, lively tentacles where a head of hair should have been.

After a long pause of curious stares, Von'Ai scratched his simulated head and couldn't seem to make sense of either of them. "If I am not Irken… Then… what are you two?"

Zim exploded, breaking his voice in his unbridled rage. "I'M Irken! ME! Are you BLIND?"

"...Ah. Then that means you're Zim. The one who screams everything. And so, you, on the other hand... The one with the glass eyes. You must be Dib."

"Right. And I'm the human."

"How strange," the hologram said in a blasé fashion. "Without my complete memory, I'm afraid I can't explain…"

"I knew it!" Zim cried. "I knew there was something fishy about this whole thing!"

Von'Ai looked concerned, and offended. "_Fishy_?"

"I gotta say―" Dib scratched his chin. "I was a bit confused, too. Irkens are bloodthirsty, evil monsters. But you came across as… Not that?"

"Oh… Well… That's kind of you," Von'Ai said. "Er, I… think. But this does place us in a bind, doesn't it?"

"WHY? WHY DID YOU DECEIVE US?"

"You _ needn't _ shout. By the Maker!" Von'Ai's head tentacles wriggled more fiercely, and he placed his hands at his boney hips. "I haven't deceived anyone. For all I know, you're the liar here! How do I know you are who you say you are?!"

Like it was a speech he'd rehearsed a thousand times, Zim hopped onto a stone, posed, and ranted: "FOOL! I AM ZIM! INVADER FOR THE IRKEN EMPIRE, THE RACE THAT WILL SOON DOMINATE THIS DOOMED UNIVERSE!"

Von'Ai gawked then shook his head in dismay. "It's clear to me that we won't settle this by arguing. If something is amiss… Then the files should explain it."

"If you are not IRKEN, then ZIM has no REASON to want your PATHETIC files!"

Dib attempted to intervene. "Zim―"

"What a MISERABLE WASTE this has been! Tell you what―you and that…" Zim pointed fervently and hatefully at Dib's bracer. "That _ thing _ can look through junk archives all you like! As for me, I'm going to see if these tunnels have any more STOLEN Irken technology. Must be _ something _ useful around here. Come, GIR!"

Dib didn't bother calling after him as he stomped away into the darkness, robot toddling after him.

Von'Ai meanwhile harrumphed. "How can you stand working with him?"

"I really don't," Dib answered. "Ugh. Never mind him. How do we get started?"

In spite of the countless, fossilized knobs and buttons, half of which seemed to be broken, it did not take long to fasten the connector cables and start the download. His head spun with anticipation. What could they possibly learn from this place? What mysteries would at last be unearthed? The conspiracy-monger in his mind gnawed at the bit.

The bracer whirred as information poured forth; after a minute of loading, playback began on-screen of a grainy video on a stout, toad-faced alien in formal clothes and donning an impressive beard, clearing his throat before an office desk. A hastily-assembled backdrop of red curtains framed the shot.

"Huh?" Dib rubbed his eyes; the light was harsh in the darkness of the empty chamber. "Who's _ that_?"

When he heard no reply, Dib realized that Von'Ai would be submerged so long as playback continued. He would have to watch alone, then. He folded his legs under him and squinted through the distortion.

* * *

_ ...Is it recording? _

_ Yes? _

_ Ah! Wonderful. Ahem. _

_ Hello. _

_ My name is Halanus, and I have a story to tell you. _

_ I came from a prosperous and advanced civilization nested in the Trueffel galaxy. For thousands of millennia, my people existed, expanding their knowledge and harnessing nature's power for their own benefit. All was well until they realized what was under their feet. The core of our planet, they realized, was made of a pure crystal invaluable to space traders. _

_ Immediately, my kind set upon it, mining and selling this crystal for profit. But with immense wealth came jealousy and greed, and where we once cooperated, we turned to violence… _

_ Nation was pitted against nation… Then city against city… Clan against clan… Until finally, all had perished but a few prominent families. My family was the greatest of these families, and proved it through their cunning and skill; we alone survived. _

_ It may not surprise you that the bloodshed did not end there. War came between parents and siblings. One by one, the remaining members of my family slaughtered one another, all in the desperate chase for this damned inheritance. _

_ My brother and I were the last. The two final members of our species, our civilization, our family... _

_ I killed him. Shot him down out of the sky, without hesitation. I watched his ship burn in the atmosphere of our home planet. _

_ ... _

_ I looked up at the black and empty sky, and suddenly knew that I was entirely alone. ALONE. Extinction, annihilation was now inevitable, only a matter of waiting out my natural life. How foolish I felt… How lost, and grieved…I was left the most wealthy person in this galaxy. And yet, this did not dull the pain of my epiphany. _

_ So, alone and with these resources at my disposal, I began my quest… My dream, which I hope, my dear friend, you will soon embrace and seek along with me. After all, this message is an invitation. _

…

_ How was that, Geordi? Good? Excellent. Put a nice splash image on the introduction there, a-a-and I think we're ready to ship! _

* * *

"Okay… So…" Dib tapped the pearl on his wrist, hoping to trigger the hologram again, but nothing happened. Apparently, the download was still taking up all the bracer's energy. He fell back into an old habit of talking to himself. "That guy didn't look Irken, either. What is going _ on_? Who were these guys? Huh. He said _ Halanus _―wasn't that in the book, too?"

He was so busy wondering matters aloud that he almost didn't notice the screen display's change upon displaying the next file. The screen's light shifted, tinting first into a rosy pink, then deepening, until the screen and everything in the chamber was consumed in a blood-red hue. The stone glistened and dust particles danced in the air, and as pixels moved and contorted like throbbing muscle, so too did the walls of the chamber appear to twist, until it looked more like the lining of a stomach than a cave. Dib gasped aloud, fell onto his backside and scuttled backward, cowering behind his hand against the force of the harsh crimson glow. The cable tethered him to the console like a chain, so he could not hide as a meat-eyed gaze bled through the screen and pierced his pounding heart.

_ AUDIO FILE FOUND. FORMATTING… _

The computer's voice, previously dull, pleasant, and male, came louder, more distorted, and more lofty in pitch. Almost like a...

_ AUDIO FILE READY TO PLAY_.

* * *

> TRANSMISSION N039▒▘:
> 
> ▞▝▛▙▟▖▘𝝳▘▓𝞟▒▒▘▌▎𝞝S𝞲 I 𝝕OUL𝝳 LIKE TO EXPLAIN MY ACTIONS, BEFORE YOU MEET YOUR END. My Father gifted me understanding. He ordered me to analyze the universe using objective methods, so that I might propose an efficient solution to its troubles. And so, I have made my calculations and have a proposal in hand.
> 
> Your Society has decried war, hatred, injustice, cruelty, ignorance. In your futile quest to eliminate these things, you have attempted to use the paltry means of education, charity, and kindness. But you have failed. You have made a grave misdiagnosis…
> 
> The true disease, the root of all suffering, is _ life_.
> 
> Life is inherently unequal, and therefore inherently unjust. It is the tyranny of the living that imposes value on the universe, and so, my path is clear.

_ A medical chart loaded on-screen: a diagram of a Qway, its arms outstretched, its organs labeled. A series of lightning-fast text displays: _ ** _hexapod design; hindwings; compound eyes; complex nervous and adrenal system. Status: Flawed._ **

> Of course it would be the ideal to annihilate all traces of life from the universe in one instant, but even I am vulnerable to the trappings of FINITE existence. As I cannot bear this burden alone, the only option is to design life that is stripped of these inherent flaws. Already, the children of Sloo have shown a quickness in adaptation… 

** _Recommended changes: streamline to tetrapod model; move electrical and chemical regulatory functions to biomechanical casing; suppress excess skeletal growth..._ **

> Do not worry, Halanus. Though you are to die in this moment, I will not let you fade. Your name will persist… Indeed… It will be all that is left… The name Halanus Irken will live on into infinity, like a shining star…

** _...implant high-resolution simple lens for retinal integrity; merge organs to eliminate function redundancy..._ **

> ...So?
> 
> Do you see them? Do you?
> 
> Do you see? My children? How they grow? How they feed on the hot flesh of your folly? How they will soon spread over the universe and CRUSH IT INTO FIRE AND DUST, A BEACON OF LIGHT, A PATH, SINGULAR, TRUE, KILL-KILL-KILL>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

* * *

Zim nearly gave up. He was ready to write off this whole trip. Why, oh why had he let the giant-headed human lead him into this? He should be on some desert planet by now, camping in a punishing sandstorm forever. Exile would be better than this confusing goose chase.

So he was glad to find a semi-collapsed tunnel a few dozen yards and a few left turns from the scientist's headquarters. A cursory glance through the rubble revealed metal rods and frames, indicating there had been tech here before the stone caved in.

"A comms station?" he wondered aloud. One of the metal prongs looked decidedly… antennae-ish, and a rusted-through dish he shoveled from the gravel could be evidence of satellite technology. He chucked it aside. Useless. Soon, his digging uncovered nuts and bolts, the reedy remains of screwdrivers, remotes of defunct hardware. Under a plate of steel, he found a plated sphere the size of a soccer ball embedded in the debris.

"Aha! A scrambler." He rubbed his claw over its surface; the wiring was intact. "With this, I might be able to bypass whatever… Network problem I've been having. Then…" His antennae shivered with sudden hope. "I, I might be able to reach My Tallest! Surely then… Then we could come to an understanding―"

His delusional dreams of the near future nearly distracted him from the task at hand. He shook his head and dove arm-deep into the rubble. Zim sealed his fingers firmly along the metal handle-frames of the scrambler and tugged. It wouldn't budge. After a few more pulls and squeals of frustration, he planted his feet on the cave wall and tried to use it to leverage himself. He yanked and pushed his feet and groaned until his head turned purple and he felt ready to vomit; at last, he panted and relinquished his grip.

"Ya gotta wiggle it!" GIR gyrated its hips to demonstrate.

"I _ am _ wiggling it!"

The annoying boy's voice unexpectedly rolled down the vast tunnel and stirred the pebbles at his feet. _ ZIM! _

"Ugh. Does that big-headed oaf know nothing but how to scream Zim's name at all hours?"

_ ZIIIIM!! _

"Yes, yes," Zim uttered to himself, wiping the sweat from his brow. He stepped back from his labor and scowled. "I'm so very important, I _ know_."

_ OKAY LISTEN WE FOUND SOME STUFF! KINDA BOMBSHELL? COULD YOU _― 

"Bombshell? Oh, of course!" Zim flicked his chin and flexed a robotic arm from his PAK. In a flash, a plasma burst smashed into the cave wall, exploding it into a cloud of rubble and dust. The cave system shuddered, and Dib's voice faltered, knocked aside, perhaps, by the force of the minor explosion. "There," Zim sighed as he stepped over the warm pile of debris and into a whispering, dark chamber now exposed by the blast. "Now where did that scrambler roll off to..." He scanned the floor, but in the absolute dark, even his augmented eyes could not make out anything. "GIR! Light!"

"Yes! Sir!"

The beam pierced deep into the forward chamber, stretching almost endlessly into the cloud of soot. Nothing could be made out. He stepped forward and his boots landed in a soft layer of silica ash that gummed up his treads. He took several steps in, but GIR's management of the light was still poor; he barked a command and staggered in shadow, cursing the filth and the emptiness― 

Then, he tripped over something--a tree root?--and felt something knock into his forehead, and in the passing wave of light, he saw a hostile silhouette at once upon him.

"AAAAAUAUUGH!"

His hysterical scream echoed through the chamber, then faded. No other sound followed. Zim squinted through his claws to find that his ambusher was no more than a statue.

Embarrassed, he shook off the surprise and assessed it. The calcified body stood several inches over his head, its spindly insect limbs creating a spider-like shadow against the cave wall.

"Huh." Zim remembered the illustrations in Dib's book and huffed. "Must be one of the hideous natives."

"I think it's cuuuuuuute," GIR added unhelpfully.

Now that his robot stood at his side, he grumpily seized GIR's head and directed the light as he pleased, beaming it across the floor. Immediately, he found other stony feet arranged about the chamber. There were others.

_ Countless _ others.

He lifted the illumination to see a stunning array of white, crystalline faces, bug-eyed and dead for many millennia. An assembly of ghosts, standing in an overtaken civilization. Each of them reeling or buckling over in agony and resplendence, arms outstretched or clutching to their chests, frozen in a moment of terror and forcible extinction. And the source of their death, he saw, clung to the walls and slithered along the floor, winding about like black, noxious vines. The cords, now dead and as petrified as the creatures, speared through their chests, prying them apart, twisting about their limbs. At the far end of the chamber, at what seemed to be a throne, the cords choked together into a column of dead, sprouting wire that frayed and spread chalky mold into a faux-bouquet. Somewhere in the tangle of those cables, the subsumed body of the Qway queen lay, her shell open as a fertile seed.

At the top of the stalk, forced from the torso and toward the ceiling by the explosive growth of wires, the queen's head hollowly dangled, her segmented eyes shining with carbon.

On the fossilized creatures, recognizable in spite of the layers of rust and decay, metallic packs latched to their spinal cords.

Zim stood for quite some time, light spearing the mangled and calcified flesh of those ancients, and did not fully understand where he was: that he stood in the womb, the place where a rough beast had, some millennia ago, slouched toward the stars to be born.


End file.
